Yeah I'm slightly pissed. Our email has been down still after the 24 hour mark. I understand why it takes 24 hours to propagate the DNS changes. DNS servers cache responses so you normally have to wait until the cache expires before it tries to query the name server again for the record you're looking for.
In this case the MX record is screwed again pointing to the wrong place again. All changes will take yet another 24 hours to propagate through the internet. The problem is I don't know who handles the DNS changes so it could be done now, or whenever our web developer gets back from wherever the hell he's at. He said he took his computer but I guess I'll believe that if/when he makes the change.
This makes me love the internet and the standard known as DNS caching. I understand it's practical use but if it takes 24 hours for changes to get where they need to be then something is wrong. In an economy where minutes are precious, waiting an entire day for something isn't practical any more. This may have been a necessity when name servers were all ran on fractional 128k T1 lines but that isn't the case now.
Turning off DNS caching can be problematic though. I don't think it should be turned off I just think that servers should cache records for far shorter periods. This eliminates a DoS attack from being performed through querying DNS records but keeps changes from taking a full 24 hours. You could have the same results caching records for 3 hours that you could if you bumped it up to 24. DNS queries are incredibly fast and have very little payload associated with them. A standard query is only a couple of bytes of data so pulling the information from the internet a little sooner won't shut down your ISP.
Honestly a lot of the standards of the internet are in need of a revamp. DNS is good but it needs something a little more robust. Email is wonderful but due to the nature of it, spam and malicious intent is severely easy to pull off. Email “Caller ID” isn't going to be the answer I think. Revamping the SMTP protocol is most likely going to be the only real way we're going to see relief from problems that plague email. That becomes a huge issue though as RFCs aren't easy to define or get implemented into everyday usage. Even if an RFC of said changes were done today it would still take years for the world at large to incorporate it into their products.
There is no quick fix for my problem or a way of keeping it from taking 24 hours every time a problem happens. That may be acceptable back in the Stone Age but we're in a time and place where transactions happen within a fraction of a second. If I have to wait 24 hours then I'm severely behind everyone else.