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I am having a crazy issue with Route53.

I have two domains: startuppatterns.com and startuppatternsbook.com. I transferred both of them to Route53 over a week ago. The transfer went fine.

Two days ago, I started setting up hosted zones so I could swap the nameservers and launch my new site. I've done this enough times for clients, it seemed no big deal.

startuppatterns.com I have successfully set up to route to an S3 bucket, where I host a static HTML site. It's got an SOA, NS, A, MX, and CNAME that are all working great. I believe the actual Nameservers were put in automatically when I transferred the domain.

startuppatternsbook.com is pointing to a bucket as well. That bucket is set to redirect to the other domain, which is what I want.

However, startuppatternsbook.com is failing. It has all the same SOA, A, NS, and CNAME records (no MX in this case), but propagation doesn't seem to be working. Route53's own testing tools seem to say it's live, but all the online tools report failure.

Not sure what to do next. Any ideas?

Sam McAfee
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  • When I say "all the same", I mean equivalent. The NS records are different; again, I think they were auto loaded during the transfer. But the values all seem legit. It's had some kind of NS for days, but it shows as failure when I check with tools like https://www.whatsmydns.net – Sam McAfee Jun 21 '17 at 15:33
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    You have both domains configured to use the same four nameservers. In my experience with Route53, this is **extremely** unusual - you always get a new, random set of four for every domain. Check the Route53 console - each domain should have a `NS` record containing its four canonical nameservers. Make sure you've used the right ones for `startuppatternsbook.com`. – ceejayoz Jun 21 '17 at 15:35
  • Oh, you're saying they shouldn't have the same NS records? I must have broken it at some point? – Sam McAfee Jun 21 '17 at 15:39
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    Yes, I suspect that's the case. It's *technically* possible to get the same set of nameservers, but I've never seen it happen - there appear to be hundreds if not thousands of different ones that get shuffled in. – ceejayoz Jun 21 '17 at 15:45
  • do you have AWS support in place at all? they're usually really helpful – kafka Jun 21 '17 at 15:59
  • I don't have support, but this may push me over the "conversion to paid" threshold. Ugh. I am looking to see if there is any way to restore the original nameservers I was given. The problem is that it still had the old Bluehost settings when I did the transfer. I don't remember when the AWS ones were generated, but I must have overwritten them on the way. – Sam McAfee Jun 21 '17 at 16:31
  • I realized I can just delete the hosted zone file, and recreate it. That gave me new NS settings and a new SOA setting. I then re-added A and CNAME. Here's hoping... I'll post an update if it works. – Sam McAfee Jun 21 '17 at 16:35
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    Yes, that should do it, too... altough on the main domains screen, clicking in the table row for a hosted zone will bring up a sidebar that will also show you the correct values that *should* be set for the NS records for that hosted zone. – Michael - sqlbot Jun 21 '17 at 20:21
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    @ceejayoz is right about extremely unusual. Apparently, impossible: [*"In fact, we enforce a rule during nameserver assignment that no hosted zone can overlap by more than two nameservers with any previously created hosted zone."*](https://www.awsarchitectureblog.com/2014/05/a-case-study-in-global-fault-isolation.html) – Michael - sqlbot Jun 21 '17 at 20:30

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I did manage to fix it. I had originally executed a transfer from another provider (Bluehost) and Route53 preserves those settings initially.

The Nameservers appear in two places. Under the hosted zone, and also under the domain. I must have accidentally overwritten the NS settings under the domain with the settings from my other domain, startuppatterns.com (not sure why I did that).

I had to delete my hosted zone file, which was no big deal since everything was broken anyway. When I created a new hosted zone file, it regenerated new NS settings for me. I then copied those into the Nameservers section under the domain.

In a couple hours, all was working perfectly.

Thanks everyone for your tips!

Sam McAfee
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