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Toby Allen
Asked: 2011-10-16 06:33:14 +0800 CST

Vodafone users can no longer see my website due to Nameserver change, is there anything I can do?

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We recently had to move our site between hosts. We moved the files and the database and then changed the nameservers to point to the new host. After a little bit of fiddling the site at the new host works well and all problems are fixed.

Well almost all, there remains one largish problem.

Irish (and possibly international) users who use vodafone (you know - the worlds second largest mobile phone company) are still being redirected to the oldsite - which now no longer exists so they are getting a non-working site.

I could understand if there was a delay of a few days before vodafone updated, but it has now been 2 weeks and all vodafone customers are still being sent to the wrong place.

All our other website visitors can see our site, all other isps in Ireland are correctly seeing the new site, googles dns servers see the new site.

We are getting phone calls from people saying that the can't see our site, every single one of these people has been using vodafone as an isp.

What I've Tried

I have tried to phone vodafone, but because I'm not a customer and because our site isn't hosted with vodafone and because I'm trying to contact their network systems people they really couldn't care less.

I've tried waiting - I assumed if I waited 10 days it might get updated, but its been 2 weeks now and still incorrect.

  • What can I do to get vodafone to update the nameservers for my site?

  • Why do they treat this differently to every other network provider on the web?

Update

According to http://www.who.is/dns/cookingisfun.ie/ The SOA record for my domain is 

cookingisfun.ie SOA 4 hours     ns1.dreamhost.com. hostmaster.dreamhost.com. 2011100306 20842 1800 1814400 14400

This is correct. I'm afraid I dont have the old details. If there is a problem in the SOA record does that mean that vodafone follows rules that everyone else ignores?

Previous nameservers were ns.webfusion.co.uk ns2.webfusion.co.uk

If I do a NSLookup from my machine using the OLD webfusion servers I get

C:\Users\Toby>nslookup


> server ns.webfusion.co.uk
Default Server:  ns.webfusion.co.uk
Address:  212.67.202.1

> cookingisfun.ie
Server:  ns.webfusion.co.uk
Address:  212.67.202.1

Name:    cookingisfun.ie
Address:  212.67.220.186

>

I will see if I can do that from someone who has vodafone as ISP

domain-name-system networking nameserver

2 Answers

  1. I could understand if there was a delay of a few days before vodafone updated, but it has now been 2 weeks and all vodafone customers are still being sent to the wrong place

    Some "big players" ignore RFCs and store cached data in ns-caches even after TTL expiration. You can do nothing with it. For more deep troubleshoot I'll be happy to see results of dig or nslookup for your hostname from unhappy vodafone users (without censoring your hostname and IP)

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  2. Best Answer

    I have done some lookups from the Vodafone DSL dialup network in Germany and they look fine - no problems resolving your site:

    dig cookingisfun.ie a

; <<>> DiG 9.6-ESV-R1 <<>> cookingisfun.ie a
;; global options: +cmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 55037
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;cookingisfun.ie.               IN      A

;; ANSWER SECTION:
cookingisfun.ie.        14400   IN      A       67.205.47.147

;; Query time: 187 msec
;; SERVER: 195.50.140.114#53(195.50.140.114)
;; WHEN: Sat Oct 15 21:25:48 2011
;; MSG SIZE  rcvd: 49

$ whois 195.50.140.114|grep -i vodafone
descr:          Vodafone D2 GmbH
org-name:       Vodafone D2 GmbH
address:        Vodafone D2 GmbH

    Can't you just bully ns.webfusion.co.uk to remove the cookingisfun.ie zone from their nameservers or change the A-Record to reflect your new IP address? If Vodafone's nameservers have incorrectly cached that ns.webfusion.co.uk is authoritative for cookingisfun.ie and would not let go of that, this would help.

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