AWS Route 53 DNS propagation time

Question

About 5 hours ago I have created a new Hosted Zone in AWS Route 53 service. The records look like as follows:

Hosted Zone domain.com

domain.com.     A
domain.com.     MX   1 ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM.
                     5 ALT1.ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM.
                     5 ALT2.ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM.
                     10 ASPMX2.GOOGLEMAIL.COM.
                     10 ASPMX3.GOOGLEMAIL.COM.
domain.com.     NS   ns-1042.awsdns-02.org.
                     ns-996.awsdns-60.net.
                     ns-280.awsdns-35.com.
                     ns-1711.awsdns-21.co.uk.
domain.com.     SOA  ns-1042.awsdns-02.org.
                     awsdns-hostmaster.amazon.com. 1 7200 900 1209600 86400
www.domain.com. A    XX.XXX.XX.XXX

I have also updated domain records for my registrar to specify AWS DNS servers there.

The record A for domain.com. is empty because it is just an alias for www.domain.com. subdomain from the same Hosted Zone. So www.domain.com. referes to a real Elastic IP address.

The official AWS documentation says:

Question: How quickly will changes I make to my DNS settings on Amazon Route 53 propagate globally?

Amazon Route 53 is designed to propagate updates you make to your DNS records to its world-wide network of authoritative DNS servers within 60 seconds under normal conditions. Note that caching DNS resolvers are outside the control of the Amazon Route 53 service and will cache your resource record sets according to their time to live (TTL).

In my case DNS records have not been propagated yet after 5 hours. I see that AWS DNS servers have already updated the records. So nslookup shows Elastic IP address for my web service properly for ASW DNS servers. But, for example, google DNS still does not know it:

nslookup domain.com 8.8.8.8: can't find domain.com: NXDOMAIN

Could you say if I performed DNS setup wrong so that DNS records have not been propagated yet?

Solution 1

I ran into a similar issue. The Registar NS records for the domain need to be updated to match the NS records within the hosted zone.

See the following for answer for instructions and thorough description: https://stackoverflow.com/a/37534217/3895401

Solution 2

I believe domainname A record must point to the IP. and add an alias to www.

For my wordpress site, i point both domain and www A record to ip address.

Comments

[Håkan Lindqvist]

You can use dig +trace +add example.com to follow the chain of delegations, that will tell you if the delegation is in place (and correct) as well as if the Route 53 servers are responding as intended. (I don't really know about this "empty A", is that some thing in Route 53 that works like that on the UI level? There is no such thing in DNS.)

[Maksim]

Håkan, thank you for the answer! Yeah, that's right, this is AWS only functionality. While ordinary Route 53 resource record sets are standard DNS resource record sets, alias resource record sets provide a Route 53–specific extension to DNS functionality. More details on it can be found here: docs.aws.amazon.com/Route53/latest/DeveloperGuide/…

[Maksim]

Thanks to dig I have noticed that AWS DNS specified in registrar were obsolete. I have corrected DNS records about 12 hours ago and see that know google DNS knows my domain: nslookup domain.com 8.8.8.8, google-public-dns-a.google.com says address XX.XXX.XX.XXX. But I use nslookup without specifying DNS server: nslookup domain.com, it says Unknown domain. I have tried to reboot router and flush local DNS.