Filed with Developers [Case 44619] Mass TTL Change

[LDHosting]

I'm also going to have to disagree with David on this one (at least as far as cPanel 11.30 goes). Yes, there is an option to change the DNS on the source server which also updates the email config so that email gets forwarded to the new server automatically. However, any web requests received on the old server for the moved domain are redirected to the cPanel 'Account Moved' page. This means that anyone who has the old IP cached (either locally or at their ISPs nameservers) and tries to visit the website after the move will see their website as down until the cached TTL expires and a new DNS lookup is done (ok, there is a helpful message explaining WHY it is down but this really doesn't help the customer who just wants to visit his website).

What that option does is explained in your documentation:

Copy Multiple Accounts/Packages from Another Server

[random]

I would like to add my voice to the need for a tool to mass change TTL values.

Having done a test with one account, I have noticed that the express transfer feature adds a message on the old server that informs the browser that the site has been moved. The browser can't access the site on the new server which means that, for all intent and purposes, the site is down for the time it will take for propagation to take place.

The instructions to clear the DNS cache make no difference with some ISPs where the DNS info is cached by the ISP (for example BT which is by far the main ISP in the UK).

The DNS data on the old server was correctly changed by the express transfer system so that the A record for the domain points to the IP of the new server, but this doesn't make a difference if the TTL value for that A record is set at a high value. It still needs to have the time to propagate.

A script to mass change the TTL value for the SOA, A and NS records is definitely required. This should be run a few days before the transfer and the express transfer process should reset those values on the new server to the default for the server so that they do not remain low on the new server.

[cPanelDavidG]

A script to mass change the TTL value for the SOA, A and NS records is definitely required. This should be run a few days before the transfer and the express transfer process should reset those values on the new server to the default for the server so that they do not remain low on the new server.

I stand corrected, thanks .

[Branko]

+1 on this to

I have mentioned this in another post of mine a while ago: http://forums.cpanel.net/f5/bulk-dns...ipt-82789.html

In any case, in this post there is attached perl script for updating TTL records for bulk domain names provided as a single domain name in a file.

Script uses: DNS::ZoneParse - search.cpan.org which is by default installable via cPanel's Perl module installer.

I would be very happy to provide any additional info on modifying the script, and or extending it to mass change any record in bulk dns zone list.

Over time I have modified the script to do mass mx record changes, mass TXT (spf) record changes, mass IP changes... etc etc..

It would be very nice to have this integrated in WHM with some kind of filters which would pass the domain names to the script which would change the mass TTL records or any other record for that matter.

[sneader]

+1 for integrating this functionality into WHM. I was really surprised to see a general lack of understanding of TTL in this thread. I'm glad that cPanelDavidG finally came around to his senses last week and is now on-board.

We have been manually editing TTLs for years... combined with the WHM-to-WHM transfer functionality, it all works great. Having an easy way to do the TTL edits would make it even better.

I appreciate those that have volunteered some scripts... will be checking those out. Thank you!

- Scott