DNS Issues and a question

I had/have an issue with dns and my domain. My domain is registered at another registrar. I changed the DNS entries at the registrar to the Dreamhost ones (i.e. ns#.dreamhost.com), waited the 72 hours and had no luck (i.e. the domain was never reachable via www, mail, ssh or ping). The registrar definitely had the Dreamhost name servers listed and an nslookup on the domain returned the Dreamhost name servers as listed for the domain. This all raised a great deal of concern!

I have since purchased a static IP. Switched the name servers back to registrars and had the dns entry point at the static IP. Now I know this isn't really the best solution, but I need things to be back up and running NOW (or at least ASAP). Will everything (i.e. www, mail, webmail) work doing things this way, at least for the immediate future? I'd prefer to specify the Dreamhost nameservers, but I need email to be up and running yesterday.

--Thanks

No repsonses?

So, here is whay I've done...

My domain has a static IP of 111.111.111.1
I've gone to my registrar and said that (mail,www,*)domain.com => 111.111.111.1
I've left the nameservers set to those of the registrar, but have the static ip as the desitination for all traffic for that domain.

This should work alright, correct?

did you add the domain into your panel here at dreamhost?

Panel > manage domains > add new



-Matttail

Well, had I been thinking about this a little more I would have realized that you cannot point your email to a specific IP at dreamhost as your mail server can change. I had a lot of trouble with this.

I've now gone back to just changing the nameservers to dreamhost's at my registrar. How long should it take before I see a suitable response from dreamhost's nameservers. I've logged into my shell account and issued a 'dig @NS1.DREAMHOST.COM mydomain.com' but the only response I'm getting is a 'SERVFAIL'. When I do the same dig at my registrar's nameservers it returns:

;; mydomain.com, type = ANY, class = IN
;; ANSWERS:
mydomain.com. 172800 NS ns1.dreamhost.com.
mydomain.com. 172800 NS ns2.dreamhost.com.
mydomain.com. 172800 NS ns3.dreamhost.com.
;; AUTHORITY RECORDS:
mydomain.com. 172800 NS ns3.dreamhost.com.
mydomain.com. 172800 NS ns1.dreamhost.com.
mydomain.com. 172800 NS ns2.dreamhost.com.
;; ADDITIONAL RECORDS:
ns1.dreamhost.com. 172455 A 66.33.206.206

Is this what I should be expecting?