I migrated from Hostgator to Linode about a month ago. Things have been great, with the exception of one user who keeps complaining that he seems to keep pointing back to the "old" site (still on Hostgator, just shut down) now and then with no rhyme or reason.

Things got very weird over the course of the analysis:

1. He ran an nslookup and the results showed he was pointing to the old server, yet somehow was properly viewing the new one.

2. He claims this happens on multiple machines

3. He supposedly flushed all caches, etc.

4. He contacted his ISP and they claim it is a problem my my DNS entries outside of them.

I use 1and1.com to host my domains, I changed the configuration there to point to Linode instead of Hostgator. All seems well for everybody that I know of except for this one guy.

We've temporarily fixed him up by adding a hosts entry, but I want to understand where the problem really lies. Has anybody ever seen something like this happen before?

What's the domain?

_________________
Matt Nordhoff (aka Peng on IRC)

yamahasupertenere.com

It's a weird case, but I don't see any problem in your side: http://www.intodns.com/yamahasupertenere.com

I read the post in your forum and nslookup uses 192.168.1.254 as DNS server. He can try to check your domain with another DNS server (google in this example) when it returns old IP: nslookup yamahasupertenere.com 8.8.8.8
(Remember to delete the entry in his hosts file before using nslookup)

run:

 dig @ns1.hostgator.com yamahasupertenere.com any

I get:

; <<>> DiG 9.7.1-P2 <<>> @ns1.hostgator.com yamahasupertenere.com any
; (1 server found)
;; global options: +cmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 63996
;; flags: qr aa rd; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 2, ADDITIONAL: 2
;; WARNING: recursion requested but not available

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;yamahasupertenere.com.         IN      ANY

;; ANSWER SECTION:
yamahasupertenere.com.  14400   IN      A       50.22.105.163

;; AUTHORITY SECTION:
.                       14400   IN      NS      ns1.hostgator.com.
.                       14400   IN      NS      ns2.hostgator.com.

;; ADDITIONAL SECTION:
ns1.hostgator.com.      8600    IN      A       67.18.54.2
ns2.hostgator.com.      8600    IN      A       67.18.54.3

;; Query time: 41 msec
;; SERVER: 67.18.54.2#53(67.18.54.2)
;; WHEN: Fri Jan 13 14:51:13 2012
;; MSG SIZE  rcvd: 131

I believe HostGator still considers itself authoritative for your domain? Their records should be purged when you move your domain, but maybe that didn't happen.