HACKER Q&A
📣 mastazi

The interesting case of the endless DNS propagation


One day about a year ago, I've noticed that the site www.aqadvisor.com was offline. (I could see a page saying "this domain is for sale" or something to that effect).

I posted about that on an aquarium hobbyists forum and several users replied they could still access the site, although a few others could not.

So I decided to run a search with DNS propagation checker and it seemed that the A record was propagating so I though "oh they must have just changed their IP".

The problem is, after about a year... it seems it's still "propagating"?

https://www.whatsmydns.net/#A/www.aqadvisor.com

How come that different ISPs can't agree on the value of this A record?

The authoritative ns for this domain is bizprime2.com:

     host -t ns www.aqadvisor.com
    www.aqadvisor.com is an alias for aqadvisor.com.
    aqadvisor.com name server ns1.bizprime2.com.
    aqadvisor.com name server ns2.bizprime2.com.
and that name server, interestingly, returns the "wrong" IP, meaning that if you use that IP you will see the message "this domain is for sale", not the actual website. However both Google NS and Cloudflare are returning the "right" IP, i.e. the one that actually lets you access the website.

So what's going on here exactly?

This seems really peculiar and I'm curious :-)

  👤 datalist Accepted Answer ✓
This domain appears to have used these two bizprime servers for almost two years, however they only return a generic IP address which most likely serves that "for sale" page.

Currently, however, the domain does not point to these nameservers but to ns3.aqadvisor.com and ns4.aqadvisor.com instead. DNS glue appears to be present for these two servers, however they themselves do not consider themselves authoritative for the domain (and don't return their own names) but only refer to bizprime again.

The whole DNS setup is somewhat broken and needs fixing by the site owner.