I have a couple of domain names that I seem to have trouble moving between web hosts. One domain -- sbsoftware.com -- was previously hosted by Solid Internet and another -- dfpainting.com -- was parked at GoDaddy.

A week ago Saturday (10/14/06) I logged into Network Solutions for sbsoftware.com and GoDaddy for dfpainting.com to change their DNS servers to my new provider, Dotable. It seems like most of the world "saw" this change within 48 hours as expected. However at least a handful of places don't seem to have picked up on the change at all! They still resolve sbsoftware.com to the IP from Solid Internet, which means web traffic & email requests are still going to my old account.

Any way I can check all the root servers at once to see if they've picked up the change of name servers? I've never encountered anything quite this weird before. It's been a little over a week and I still have visitors and email traffic going to my old host. Help!

It can take a while to propogate these dns changes throughout the internet. You should also tell whoever is still trying to reach you from the non-updated locations to clear their browser cache and try again.

Clearing the browser cache wouldn't help in this case.

I have control over one of the DNS servers that I see this issue with. I flushed out the DNS server's cache and reloaded and it came back with the proper settings. But after a day it was pulling the old DNS settings again! Aaaaaargh!

On top of that, I get weather forecasts emailed to me daily. One day it goes to my new host, next day to my old. It's repeated that pattern all bloody week.

Any thoughts?

I've no idea what would cause a phenomenum like that, except, clutching at straws, someone restoring backups without regards to the consequences. Which I'm sure is an unlikely scenario.

Sounds like it's an ISP issue. Sometimes when ISPs refresh their DNS cache, they
tend to fluctuate from the new to old and vice versa.

Make sure your computer's clean, too.

I logged into my Network Solutions account and swapped the order of the DNS servers. I am really hoping this forces whatever screwed up root servers are out there to correct themselves and stop pointing to my old web host's DNS servers. If I continually flush and reload my DNS cache there is a small (10% or so) chance the DNS request will be handled by the old host.

Anyone can correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the order of nameservers doesn't
really matter as long as the Start Of Authority (SOA) records indicates what's the
first nameserver to be "looked at". If WHOIS shows your DNS at ns2/ns1.server
yet your server's SOA says the 1st one will be ns1, then computers will still look up
ns1 before ns2.

Right, but this seems to be an issue with one or more of the root servers around the world. I've verified that both ns5.dotable.com and ns6.dotable.com properly resolve all sbsoftware.com records (www A record, MX record, etc). So we're talking about an issue where not all the root servers in the world saw my update.

I've just never seen anything like this, and I'm not sure where I'd even begin to look to start fixing it.

Edit: Ah, here we go: http://www.squish.net/dnscheck/. I put in my own domain name and it looks like all the root servers are correct. So either I'm going insane or what I did earlier (swapping the name servers) forced the broken root server to correct itself. Thanks for the help so far folks. Hope this is it :)