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You have a domain (DNS zone) registered, but your registrar makes some inimical change, and you decide to transfer to a different registrar rather than go along with what they did. You sign up, pay the fee, the domain appears to be transferred, but WHOIS and the glue records still point to the old registrar.
Undoubtedly there are registrars to which this description does not apply, but in my case the new registrar is Hurricane Electric and the old one is Dynamic Network Services Inc. (dyn.com), which has been eaten and thoroughly chewed up by Oracle.
See the end for a glossary of acronyms.
Different parts of the process are done by different agencies, and you need to interact with the right one at the right step in the process. The key step is, you (not the registrar) need to edit your domain's child NS RRs to point to the DNS server(s) that have the actual description of your domain.
The procedure to transfer my domain should have gone like this:
Find out your old registrar's name and IANA ID before starting
the transfer process. The command on UNIX-like systems would be
whois -H example.com
. Look for the Registrar keyword.
It is common practice for web hosting companies and similar cloud
services to outsource the domain registration process to a
wholesale
registrar, which provides a user interface with the
retail
registrar's branding. For example, Hurricane Electric
has an entity called
HurricaneNames which they describe as a front end
to
Register.com. Work with your
old and new registrar's branded retail registration service as much
as possible; but the identity of the wholesale registrar will be
important so you can tell whether the transfer has happened and so
you can straighten out messes.
While the user experience is smoothest if your login credentials on the old and new services are honored by the respective retail registrars, this is not the case with Hurricane Electric: you will need to create a separate account on HurricaneNames.
Make sure both registrars have your current e-mail address, because they will be sending you e-mail which you will need to respond to.
Although some (new) registrars are said to be able to copy (AXFR)
your zone from the old DNS service, I was not able to figure out how to
do that. If possible you should download a file containing your zone
RRs; otherwise copy them all by hand. Hurricane Electric's web UI for
editing the zone has a checkbox for raw zone dump (AXFR)
so you
can easily copy and paste your zone data, but dyn.com didn't have this.
With Hurricane Electric's DNS service (dns.he.net), you will need to send a message to customer service asking for a credential so they know that the person who is trying to get them to import your domain actually has control of the domain on the old registrar, i.e. is you. They will give you a TXT record with a domain name which they look for, and an encoded value. On the old registrar's DNS service, add this TXT record. It really helps to do this step before burning your bridges on the old registrar.
On the old registrar, unlock your domain, i.e. allow the domain to be transferred. Look for the EPP code, by which the new registrar will prove to the old registrar that the domain owner has authorized it to take over the domain.
Make sure the new registrar has your payment method. Best to set this up in advance.
On the new registrar, navigate to the Transfer page. Fill out the web form which will include at least the domain name and the EPP code, plus various extra cost services which you may or may not want. Hit Transfer.
Review the domain name, the EPP code, and the price. Read the terms of service. Confirm the transaction. Copy down your transaction or confirmation number.
It took about 2 hours for my order status to change from Initiated to Awaiting Confirmation, at which point the old registrar sent me e-mail asking if I really wanted to transfer. The times mentioned here probably vary a lot between registrars.
On the old registrar's domain management page, a pair of buttons appeared for Cancel and for Transfer Now. Click. Without this step, the old registrar would have waited 6 days before doing the transfer, in case I got cold feet and wanted to cancel.
After about 4 hours the new registrar showed a status of Transferred Successfully and the old one notified me by e-mail that my domain was off their system. However, their DNS was still serving my domain. With them I pay for DNS and the service period had not yet ended.
WHOIS now showed my registrar as Register.com. But the NSs in WHOIS were unchanged, pointing to the old registrar's DNS servers. The new registrar showed a notice saying that the domain was not properly delegated, i.e. the NSs need to change to their DNs servers.
You should populate your zone, either by uploading the saved zone file or by adding records by hand. Since I had not added the credential TXT record on the old DNS service, the zone was locked and I needed to ask Hurricane Electric customer service for the credential. I suspect, but am not sure, that the zone would not have been locked if I had set up the credential in advance.
At this point I went around in circles trying to find where to change the NS records and which of the various involved agencies would be doing it. Finally after some help from Hurricane Electric's excellent customer service people…
Since HurricaneNames is now my retail registrar, I navigated to their Manage Domain page for my domain. Under DNS Servers is an editable list of NSs for the child domain (mine). I edited them, hit Save, and confirmed the change.
In well under 5 minutes, the NSs were updated on WHOIS and were
pushed to the TLD apex nameservers (I checked A, B, F and J). (These
are called glue records.) It is not beyond belief that other
registrars might take longer to do the update. Command line:
dig @a.gtld-servers.net. jfcarter.net NS
However, the TTL on the glue records is 2 days, and you will have to wait this long for client caches to time out, before everyone will be using the new DNS service.
DNS: Domain Name Service, translates from an alphabetic hostname in your zone to its numeric address and vice versa. Other kinds of information are also made available through DNS.
NS: Name Server, the node (computer) that will answer DNS queries. It's recommended to have several NSs in case one becomes inoperative.
RR: Resource Record, a record in a database telling which numeric address belongs to which alphabetic name. Various other kinds of information are in this database, particularly NS records. The NS sends RRs to the client in a standard format (see RFC 1035 and 1034).
Domain: Anything that you could make a DNS query about. But see Zone.
Zone: A collection of domains administered as a unit. It is hierarchical and all the domains share an apex domain. In the context of registering and transferring a domain, this apex domain is the object being worked on, specifically its NSs. Example: the apex might be example.com, with a SOA and several NSs and possibly other RR types. Member domains might be node1.example.com, node2.example.com, etc. etc.
TLD: Top Level Domain, like .com or .net or .us .
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