Reading WhoIs Information

From Lunarpages Web Hosting Wiki

How do you read the WhoIs information that you get about your domain name? Simply go to your registrar (the company you registered the domain name with) and login with the user name and password they gave you when you registered the domain name and then change your nameservers to match our nameservers we assigned to you when your account was created. This could vary depending on the server you are hosted on, so best to check in your Welcome E-mail or via the Customer Account Page.

(Please note that some sites have dynamicname instead of lunarpages listed for the nameservers; dynamicname and lunarpages are interchangeable nameserver names)

Additionally, the IP addresses will be included in your Welcome E-mail or the CAP. These are the correct IP addresses and are very important to note when looking at the WhoIs data that I will explain below.

Please note after changing the nameservers to reflect your new host it takes up to 72 hours for servers world wide to learn of your domain's new location. Your domain name will not work nor will your e-mail until propagation has taken place.

Now, for the Whois info:

Do a Whois search at a company like Centralops at http://centralops.net/co/ For the selection, choose "Domain Dossier" on the left, then check only the DNS records option. Now, click go. Using my website (bestgarden.net), I received the following results (please note that the only way I could get the DNS records to line up using BBCode was to input them as code even though in Whois they are not code):

Address lookup canonical name bestgarden.net. aliases addresses 64.235.234.68

DNS Records:

 name                        class  type   data                     
 bestgarden.net              IN     A      64.235.234.68 
 bestgarden.net              IN     NS     ns1.lunarpages.com 
 bestgarden.net              IN     NS     ns2.lunarpages.com
 bestgarden.net              IN     SOA    server: ns1.lunarpages.com 
                                           email: alerts@lunarpages.com 
                                           serial: 1066614823 
                                           refresh: 28800 
                                           retry: 7200 
                                           expire: 3600000 
                                           minimum ttl: 86400 
 bestgarden.net              IN     MX     preference: 0 
                                           exchange: bestgarden.net 
 68.234.235.64.in-addr.arpa  IN     PTR    leo.lunarpages.com 
 234.235.64.in-addr.arpa     IN     SOA    server: ns1.lunarpages.com 
                                           email: hostmaster@add2net.com 
                                           serial: 2003110413 
                                           refresh: 28800 
                                           retry: 7200 
                                           expire: 2419200 
                                           minimum ttl: 86400

Also, please note that I removed the time to live field from WhoIs in my listing above.

Okay, to explain the important areas to note. First of all, look at addresses under Address lookup. It shows 64.235.234.68. Next, look at the Nameservers (NS) in DNS records. They are shown as:

ns1.lunarpages.com ns2.lunarpages.com

Now, this shows that my nameservers are set correctly.

So, how do I know the IP is right? Well, look at the PTR entry under type. It shows leo.lunarpages.com (my server) and 68.234.235.64 as the IP. This is the reverse of the IP address shown above (64.235.234.68), which is how it appears in the pointer. This means that yes, my site is live and propagated.

If you ever have a question as to whether your site is propagated, has the correct nameservers, whatever, look at these DNS records and the Address lookup, and follow the steps of comparison I just detailed to confirm they are Lunarpages nameservers and your server on Lunarpages. If they are, you are good to go. If they are not and it has been over 3 days, contact us and we can look into it.