MX Record Will Not Propogate

[Carefree]

We have a website hosted through a reseller. We moved our office and changed the MX record on the CPanel but it never gets propogated to the domain name servers. It's been 2 weeks and the IP address still hasn't updated.

The reseller is in India on vacation and cannot be reached; however, I do have the reseller password to the panel. If anyone can tell me what to do to fix this thing, I'd appreciate it. If not, we're going to have to pull out of the CPanel hosted sites because they're useless in the current configuration.

admin@carefreecomputing.net

[webignition]

The best way to check would be through WHM, but this really depends on what level of access the reseller has.

You can login to WHM at http://hostname.example.com/whm or https://hostname.example.com:2087/ (where hostname.example.com is the address you would normally use for cpanel). You would need to login with the reseller's details.

In WHM, scroll the left-hand menu down to DNS functions and choose 'Edit an MX Entry', find your domain and check that the MX record is listed correctly. If not, change it. If so, change it to something else, save it, change it back, save it again.

To be double sure, choose 'Edit a DNS Zone' from the same DNS functions section and compare the full zone file for your domain with others to see if you can spot any obvious mistakes.

As I said, this depends on the level of access the reseller has - if this DNS options are not available to the reseller you won't see them in WHM.

[brianoz]

It's probably easiest if you supply us with a real domain name, this sort of thing is too hard to diagnose otherwise as there can be multiple causes.

A great place to start is with www.dnsstuff.com. Put the site domain name into the top of the right hand column and see if that detects an error. Check the nameservers are correct. Check the correct records come back (ie with correct IP addresses). Change from 'A' to 'MX' and check you get the new MX settings being returned.

If the problem is that you're trying to change the MX location, I've found cpanel to be a bit unreliable with this. When you alter the domain's MX record to point to a location hosted off the machine, it should delete your domain from /etc/localdomains and add it to /etc/remotedomains. /etc/localdomains lists domains for local mail delivery and /etc/remotedomains lists domains which host their email elsewhere, even though they are hosted on the machine for DNS and web services. I've often had to manually alter /etc/localdomains and /etc/remotedomains to get everything set up correctly.

If I can help feel free to send me a PM with details.