Missing nameservers reported by parent and your nameservers

I've been going at this for a few days now and neither previous hosting company nor current one seem to be able to help me sort this out. I am migrating an opencart-based online shop between two servers and there seems to be some DNS trouble. I have two fail errors in intodns.com:

  1. Missing nameservers reported by parent

    ❗️FAIL: The following nameservers are listed at your nameservers as nameservers for your domain, but are not listed at the parent nameservers (see RFC2181 5.4.1). You need to make sure that these nameservers are working.If they are not working ok, you may have problems!
    ns1.caixasbaratas.pt
    ns2.caixasbaratas.pt

  2. Missing nameservers reported by your nameservers

    ❗️ERROR: One or more of the nameservers listed at the parent servers are not listed as NS records at your nameservers. The problem NS records are:
    ns1.esoterica.com
    ns2.esoterica.com
    This is listed as an ERROR because there are some cases where nasty problems can occur (if the TTLs vary from the NS records at the root servers and the NS records point to your own domain, for example).

I've seen this issue in other queries and I know the fails have something to do with name servers listed at my registrar not matching the namerservers at my new hosting company. I believe I changed on both; both ends customer support stat that I did.

Also found at DNSstuff.com that "One or more stealth nameservers discovered". This again points to some inconsistency between the registrar and the server.

The website is caixasbaratas.pt.


Solution 1:

The nameservers currently listed at the .pt top level registry are ns1.esoterica.com and ns2.esoterica.com. When I query those two servers, neither of them has any information about your domain, so they can't answer DNS queries. Obviously I can't know whether esoterica.com are your old or your new provider, but it's obvious that the .pt registry is not in sync with your actual nameservers.

When you are changing your nameservers, you need to be aware that changes of glue records at the top level registry aren't instantaneous. The zone file for a TLD is usually very large, and reloading it takes time - they can't do it every time someone wants to make a change, instead it's scheduled to reload at intervals. The length of those intervals can vary. So, when you are changing nameservers, it's best to do it in several steps:

  1. Make sure your new nameservers are handling your zone correctly before you do anything else. You can test this even before the TLD glue records are changed, by running your domain through DNSCheck for undelegated domains.
  2. Change the glue records at your TLD.
  3. Wait - at least a couple of hours, possibly a day.
  4. Check that dig caixasbaratas.pt now returns the new glue records
  5. Wait another day, to allow any cached information around the world to expire
  6. Remove your zone from the old nameservers

By going this slowly, you can be certain that your domain does not become unreachable due to glue record mismatches.

Solution 2:

I had same problem and it was gone after adding these lines to my zone file:

@       IN  NS      ns1.example.com.
@       IN  NS      ns2.example.com.

Some notes:

  • Don't forget to increase SOA serial number after changing the zone file. (for example adding those two records)
  • if you're using @ in your records don't forget to define its value using $ORIGIN example.com. at begin of your zone file.