Cloudflare DNS SOA and A records not updating

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Oncop53

273 posts

Ultimate Geek

#155982 15-Nov-2014 15:37

Hi, I started using Cloudflare on my websites about 2 months ago, and I am generally pretty happy, but I noticed that not all traffic is being routed through Cloudflare. All DNS servers have picked up the new NS records:
https://www.whatsmydns.net/#NS/rhizobia.co.nz
But not all (including Google!) have picked up the new (cloudflare supplied) SOA and A records:
https://www.whatsmydns.net/#A/rhizobia.co.nz

What is going on here? Geekzone works fine:
https://www.whatsmydns.net/#A/geekzone.co.nz

All I did when implementing Cloudflare was to change my name servers to those supplied by Cloudflare, it seems this has mostly worked but not completely. Any ideas?

timmmay

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#1176612 16-Nov-2014 08:29

You appear to have four name servers, including two at cloudflare and two elsewhere

http://mxtoolbox.com/SuperTool.aspx?action=a%3arhizobia.co.nz+&run=toolpage#

Suggest you go to your domain name registrar and remove everything but the first two. It should use the first one unless there's a failure, so it shouldn't help, unless it's doing some kind of round robin on the name servers. I don't know for sure it'll help, my DNS knowledge isn't perfect, but it's worth a shot.

Oncop53

273 posts

Ultimate Geek

#1176670 16-Nov-2014 10:50

Thanks, another useful site.
I did delete the old NS servers (ns1.openhost.net.nz) when I changed to the cloudflare ones, these are my current settings (Plesk seems to let you change it in two places?)

[click images to embiggem]

But it still seems that these are getting picked up somehow. Perhaps this is the "Parent NS" I wonder if this can be changed or if it is just baked in at my hosting provider.

timmmay

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#1176678 16-Nov-2014 11:10

Those seems to be the DNS records on your ISP. Can you screen shot the name server setup on your domain registrar? That'll be 1st domains, GoDaddy, Discount Domains, etc. You need to point your registrar at the cloudflare servers then do all your DNS records there.

I did a whois on 1stdomains whois (try it yourself, I can't link to it). The results are below. I think what I said above is right, that you haven't set things up quite correctly, there's some inconsistence there.

ns_name_01: ns1.openhost.net.nz ns_name_02: ns2.openhost.net.nz

Can you please do screen grabs (properly labelled) of:
- Your domain registrar name server setup
- Cloudflare DNS records
- Your ISP DNS records (which could be irrelevant as cloudflare is possibly doing DNS)

mattwnz

20155 posts

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#1176729 16-Nov-2014 12:40

Your hosting provider should help with this, to make sure you have it all setup correctly.

michaelmurfy

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#1176762 16-Nov-2014 13:16

You shouldn't change this in Plesk - it should be done via your hosting provider (1stdomains) avoiding Plesk alltogether.

Michael Murphy | https://murfy.nz
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timmmay

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#1176766 16-Nov-2014 13:34

mattwnz: Your hosting provider should help with this, to make sure you have it all setup correctly.

Using cloudflare bypasses the hosting provider. The domain registrar points at the root name servers with the SOA record, which is cloudflare, web host DNS is never checked.

michaelmurfy: You shouldn't change this in Plesk - it should be done via your hosting provider (1stdomains) avoiding Plesk alltogether.

As above - 1st domains is primarily a domain registrar, not a hosting provider - though they likely do both.

Oncop53

273 posts

Ultimate Geek

#1176988 16-Nov-2014 20:06

Awesome thanks for your help, I managed to get it sorted.

Both my websites AND domains are hosted by OpenHost. They are both managed through a Plesk web interface. It turns out that there are not one but THREE places to change the DNS settings, two of these are the screen shots above. I just found the other place and altered it there too.

I think one of them must be the master list and the other ones slaved to it, if you knew what you were doing I guess you could just change one.

The really confusing thing here was that it partially worked the way I did it initially, if it didn't work at all I would have kept trying.

One of the sites I manage is a society that doesn't have a lot of money, this site has been going slightly over the traffic limit (2GB) for the past few months, but yesterday went over the limit again only half way though the month, hopefully now with cloudflare fully working blocking all the bots we can stay within our limit.

Cheers.

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Oncop53

273 posts

Ultimate Geek

#1176993 16-Nov-2014 20:17

Just in case this thread is useful to someone else here is the "third place"

Yes it should have been obvious being on the "name servers" tab, but I thought that changing the name servers in the DNS Zone tab was enough. Oh well sorted now.

timmmay

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#1177006 16-Nov-2014 20:40

Good to hear :)