Web Developers → Question about domains and DNS and all

Hi, first of all, sorry if it's the wrong place to ask this.

Yesterday I bought a domain name at GoDaddy for personnal use. After doing some researches I decided to use it with freedns.afraid.org. (So I can use the dynamic dns features in my router)

So, after buying my domain I registered it on freedns.
I went on GoDaddy, changed the nameservers to afraid's servers.
Waited about 2 hours and then manuelly checked for broken domains.... success! It says everything is looking good.

I also redirected the subdomains (www,irc,mail,ftp) to my own IP adress.

Alright, so this morning, some weird things happens. Some times when I try to ping my domain, it's still GoDaddy's IP that answer. A few minutes later, it's my own IP adress. It keeps jumping to one IP to the other.

Is it normal? Must I wait a bit longer?

What DNS server(s) is your router pointing at, as well as your NIC settings on your PC if you're using a local static IP address?

That was the problem I think.

DNS 1 and DNS 2 were Google.

I didn't write anything for DNS 3, so my router used my ISP's DNS.

I tried adding a 3rd DNS that I fouind by searching on Google and now when I send some pings I always get the right IP.

Just to explain what might have happened...

DNS as you know resolves a name to an IP address. Along with what name resolves to what IP address are other bits of info such as how long to cache that IP address without checking to see if it changed. That is called the TTL (time to live). Once the TTL expires, the next time a request comes for that name, it doesn't use what it has but checks to see what it uses.

It could have been a device you were hitting had previously cached the old GoDaddy IP address and the TTL hadn't expired yet so it was just using what it knew to be the destination. Also your own computer can cache the info so you need to be aware of that as well.

Normally I wouldn't suggest you change DNS servers to deal with this. The easiest way would be to temporarily code it on your one machine in the local HOSTS file and then in a day or two remove it.

@BigBlarg,

I'm with Go Daddy and came across your post.

The information that @GeekNJ regarding cached DNS would be correct.

If you still have any concerns or questions feel free to reply or to send me a direct message.

Thank you Ken. In the end it would seem I wasn't patient enough. Everything is working fine now.