Today I sent a quick note to Godaddy regarding their help page Modifying .DE Name Servers which unfortunately does not work too well. As a matter of fact, the information provided results in the Denic reply "The modifications you requested for the domain have FAILED. Error: RegCCTLDSvc: ModifyRegistration request failure - UNHANDLED NIC RESPONSE". Based on my own experience, I recommended they change the contents of that help page to the following as the setting below actually works. Once the change has been completed, you can ironically change the settings of your DNS and still pass the Denic test. Go figure.

When modified for a .DE domain name, the new name servers must meet the following criteria:

• Refresh rate between 10000 and 86400 seconds
• Retry rate between 1800 and 28800 seconds
• Expiration rate between 604800 and 3600000 seconds
• Resource record TTL (Time To Live) between 180 and 345600 seconds

Practically some of these values cause errors, we recommend the following settings:

• Refresh rate: 10000
• Retry rate: 3600
• Expiration rate: 604800
• Minimum TTL: 86400

The following criteria must also be met:

• The domain MX record must resolve to a mail server that is valid for the life of the domain registration.
• The DNS servers must be located on two distinct class C networks.
• The zone files for both name servers must have matching serial numbers.
• The primary and secondary hosts specified in both zone files must match the first and second name servers entered.

After adding your .de domain to your new name servers, you may check your settings at http://zonecheck.denic.de/zonecheck/. Enter your information in the following fields:

• Zone: YourDomainname.de
• Primary: NewNameserver1 (or enter the IP of your new primary DNS in the IPs box)
• Secondary: NewNameserver2 (or enter the IP of your new secondary DNS in the IPs box)

Click the Check button. On the following page, review the last two lines above the footer. If they read:

Endresultat (End result)
ERFOLGREICH (SUCCESSFUL)

you are ready to switch the DNS for YourDomainname.de to NewNameserver1 and NewNameserver2.

For reference, the original DNS servers GoDaddy provides for .de domains are parkct1.secureserver.net and parkct2.secureserver.net. Domains parked at GoDaddy are pointed to 68.178.232.100.