Yahoo Slurp DNS Lookup Asleep at the Wheel

[newsblaze]

On Sunday night, we moved NewsBlaze.com over to a new server. (5405 dual processor quad core with 4Gb ram) Most things went well, only a couple of php and apache issues.

I had already changed the DNS TTL to 10 minutes, a few days before, to help speed up propagation at the changeover. Within an hour, there were incoming calls to the new box. 4 hours later, 50/50. 8 hours later, just a few stragglers still on the old machine.

On Tuesday morning only Yahoo Slurp is still calling. We've issued 1000 new stories in that time and they can't see any of them. In the past 19 hours, they've made 21,982 calls for stories.

Upsizing Linux Servers Getting Easier

Do you have advice on how to tell them they're missing something (2009) and all they have to so is stop and sniff the DNS roses? I hope their DNS cache isn't forever!

[wige]

To prevent overloading the DNS system with requests, most search engines will cache DNS information, often for longer than usual times. As far as I know, the only way to force a search engine to update the DNS cache for your server is to ensure the old server responds to requests for the moved domain with a domain not available (no such host or bad gateway) response.