Changing Name Servers

On a domain record at DirectNIC, there is room for up to 6 name servers.
I am in the process of relocating several domains from one server to
another. The present name server entries are ns1.oldserver.com and
ns2.oldserver.com. If I add ns1.newserver.com and ns2.newserver.com as
the third and fourth entries now, when I make the change this weekend,
if I take down the site on oldserver, will traffic automatically find
its way to newserver? I would then, of course, update the domain record
to exclude the entries for oldserver.

Obviously I'm trying to make the transition as smooth as possible to
avoid the problems with DNS changes not propagating simultaneously all
over the world.

I've never seen this done, so there are probably good reasons for me not
to do it. I thought I would ask.

Forging a path through the Usenet jungle, armed only with a rusty
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041206
Thunderbird/1.0 Mnenhy/0.7.2.0, mcp6453 stumbled into alt.www.webmaster
and said:

 > On a domain record at DirectNIC, there is room for up to 6 name servers.
 > I am in the process of relocating several domains from one server to
 > another. The present name server entries are ns1.oldserver.com and
 > ns2.oldserver.com. If I add ns1.newserver.com and ns2.newserver.com as
 > the third and fourth entries now, when I make the change this weekend,
 > if I take down the site on oldserver, will traffic automatically find
 > its way to newserver? I would then, of course, update the domain record
 > to exclude the entries for oldserver.
 >
 > Obviously I'm trying to make the transition as smooth as possible to
 > avoid the problems with DNS changes not propagating simultaneously all
 > over the world.
 >
 > I've never seen this done, so there are probably good reasons for me not
 > to do it. I thought I would ask.

Don't do that it will take longer to propogate.

Web: Just leave the old site up for as long as possible during the
transition

web + database: create a new hostname (subdomain) at the new host. Set
the old server to respond with a 302 to the new hostname.

mail: is a pita no matter which way you look at it. there's several ways
to approach this depending on several things including how good your
relationship is with your clients.

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