How to Change Nameservers on all Zones in cPanel

Sometimes you may need to to change your Nameservers for your zone files. Using the following commands, you'll make the needed changes to have your server switched over to the new nameserver.

Log into WHM, then go to Server Configuration » Basic cPanel & WHM Setup

At the bottom of the section you'll see an area called Nameservers

Change the entries to your new nameserver address then click Save Changes

Make a backup of your existing zone files just in case something goes wrong. You can do this by running the following in the command line:

cp -rf /var/named /var/named.backup

Next, replace your old nameserver entries in each zone by running the following command, while making sure to put your nameservers old and new addresses in the respective areas inside of the quotes.

Run the following code:

replace "old.example" "new.example" -- /var/named/*.db

In order to show that the file was updated, you'll need to update the serials of each zone file. Run the following command:

find /var/named/*.db -mtime -1 -exec perl -pi -e 'if (/^\s+(\d{10})\s+;\s+serial/i) { my $i = $1+1; s/$1/$i/;}' '{}' \;

In order to have your server reflect the new zones, run the following command:

service named reload