How can I test if Zone Transfers are configured properly?

If you’ve followed the steps in our KB article How do I enable Zone Transfers and you are still not having any luck, here is something you can do to test if zone transfers are working and you have properly configured the Pool IP addresses. You must be on a Microsoft Windows PC in order to use the nslookup tool we will reference.

1. First, you need to obtain the public IP of your PC. Since this could be a home cable modem IP or a corporate firewall, we highly recommend going to http://www.myipaddress.com to find out what your public IP address is right now.
2. Now that you have your current public IP, add IT to the Zone Transfer Pool that is assigned to the domain name you wish to transfer out. Follow the article How do I enable Zone Transfers if you haven’t already done this.
3. Now let’s test if zone transfer to your local PC works. Open a command prompt on your PC. Generally you can find this in the Start menu under Accessories. When open, type the following commands (without the > symbol) and substituting yourdomain.com for your real domain.

If you immediately get a message back that says *** Can’t list domain yourdomain.com: Query refused you know that you haven’t properly added your IP to the domain. If you get a long list of results that look like the records within your domain, then you know zone transfers are enabled successfully, at least to the IP of your desktop IP address. Simply add the IP addresses of the other DNS server or provider to the Zone Transfer Pool and it should work.