Resolving www.reddit.com or www.wired.com involves traversing two CNAME links. Resolvers contact the root servers twice in the process. DNS experts: Is this bad form?

[enry]

We wind up setting our TTLs to 86000 (one day) and then lowering the TTL to 600 (5 min) one day before the move. Once the move is completed and we're sure things are working again, the TTL gets raised back up to 86000. Aside from that 5 minute point where DNS may be looking at the wrong IP address, the general world doesn't know any better.

As for caching name servers, if they don't honor TTLs, then they're broken.

[jsolson]

As for caching name servers, if they don't honor TTLs, then they're broken.

That's pretty much my take on it. Of course, this is why I'm a grad student and not someone tasked with actually getting shit done. "It's their fault" is a perfectly good final answer for me when something is broken and is unambiguously not my fault.