This was kinda cool – in a very geeky way I guess.

Tonight in work I had an issue which was eventually narrowed down to being a fault with DNS. Now, I’m fairly good with DNS stuff but the answer to this one had me stumped so the original change engineer was contacted. After a run down of the problem and what I thought the issue was he’d soon found the problem – a typo in an A record, well more accurately a mis-spelling but the end result was the same.

Anyway, he quickly changed it and somewhere in the ensuing conversation uttered the words “watching it propagate” … well I know that DNS needs to propagate but didn’t realise you could watch it almost in real time. So of course I asked … and he pointed me at DNSWatch.info where you can pump in the IP or do

main name that you’ve just changed and by refreshing the browser window you can literally watch it reach the various root nameservers.

As I say cool geeky and perhaps just a touch sad!