How to find your old host
June 19th, 2007 | by Mike Corey |I came across an issue today. After changing hosts, I decided that I wanted to recover my data from my old host. A problem of course arises that the dns entry for condescension.net has changed from my old host to the new one. So FTPing into my host accesses GoDaddy instead of TotalChoice hosting. After multiple failed attempts to get tech support to tell me how to access my old site, I decided to take matters into my own hands.
On Windows, to do a DNS lookup one can use a tool called nslookup. Normally when you nslookup a page it uses the DNS server you (or your ISP) provided in your network settings. However, if we execute nslookup without any arguments we arrive at a prompt. Within this prompt we can set the DNS server we want to query. I was able to remember that the dns servers for TotalChoice hosting are dns[N].totalchoicehosting.com. With this information we can use the following comman to set the query server:
server dns3.totalchoicehosting.com
With the server specified we can then ask it for the ip it knows my site to be:
name condescension.net
Success! The correct IP is returned. From there I’m able to ftp into that IP and download all the old crap on my site.
