DNS not updating for single network

[redhaven]

Hi All,

I am a web developer/programmer and I have a problem. First off, I work for a relatively small to medium sized company with a somewhat dysfunctional IT department so I am not getting much help there.

I was tasked with refreshing the corporate website which I built on a new hosted server and when it was ready, I had an IT guy point the domain to the new server. It all went well except for some reason everyone that is connected to our corporate network is still seeing the old website. It has now been 48 hours and while everyone else in the world appears to be getting routed correctly, including me when I am home even if I am connected to my office VPN, people at the office that are connected to the network directly are not seeing it.

I have tried doing tracert and nslookup in both places and when I am connected to the network, I get the old IP and when I am home, I get the new IP.

Does anyone have any ideas why this might be happening? I was thinking that there must be a hard coded record somewhere that is telling local machines to point to the old site. The problem is that along with being mildly dysfunctional, the IT department is almost all new so none of them would know if an exception was made somewhere.

I was thinking maybe it has something to do with the web security company they use? I am at a loss but this site needs to be available to people on the network because it is hard to explain to a CEO how DNS works and expect them to accept that while they see one thing, everyone else sees the new website.

Thanks!
Red

 

[Zargon]

sounds like the company has internal DNS running for it?

 

[seepy83]

Could be that their internal dns server has an entry for it. Could be some DNS rewrite/doctoring happening on a firewall. Could be host file entries (probably not likely).

 

[redhaven]

I am trying to get them to check right now. How would that be configured? Would it be a service that runs on a server somewhere or maybe a hosts file like on a regular PC? I was thinking that maybe someone locally specified the routing of the A record when they were routing mail.

 

[seepy83]

Check the DNS settings on their PCs. If they're all pointing at a local RFC1918 address, then you know that there is a DNS server running on the network. You would need to have access to that server and check the DNS configuration (which is going to be done differently depending if it's a Windows Server, Linux, etc).

If there is DNS doctoring happening in the firewall, you would need to change the configuration there.

It's really hard to give advice without knowing more about the environment. It might be best for them to bring in a local IT services group to figure out how things are set up.

 

[kevnich2]

As others have mentioned, there likely is an internal DNS server or multiple internal DNS servers running for the network. If this is a domain based system, it's a requirement to have internal DNS. Find the systems admin in IT and simply instruct them to take a look at the DNS entries in one of the DC's and see if there's a domain name of whatever your website is. If there is, have them update the A record for both the root as well as www to point to the correct new server.

 

[jsbush]

- Check DNS IP on a client PC, if internal IP, go to internal DNS server
- If there is internal DNS make sure no zone exists for this domain name, if so, update the zone IP to reflect if not: do 'ipconfig /flushdns' in elevated command prompt and in DNS MMC do a 'clear cache', run a ping from the DNS server
- On client machine, change DNS to public DNS (8.8.8.8) do 'ipconfig /flushdns' ping domain name, should resolve correct. Set back DNS to orginal, run a ping to domain name