DNS from the IT Administrators point of view

DNS from the IT Administrators point of view – Making a web site live

Let's move on. Let's suppose you want to put up a web site on your new domain name? You find a suitable, reliable web hosting company, buy an account and visit their control panel and create your web site, even if it is just a simple page with "Hello, world" on it.

Now you have a choice to make - you need to setup your DNS settings. For this example, let's say your DNS is currently hosted at GoDaddy, you can continue with that and go and add records there or you could move your DNS to your web hosting company, it's your choice (dedicated DNS hosting is available from EasyDNS, DNS Made Easy and DynDNS - all excellent companies with good infrastructure). If you want to stay with GoDaddy for DNS, you will need to change a few things, basically, remove your entries from pointing to parking servers to point to real servers. There is nothing inherently wrong with staying with GoDaddy, they have reasonable controls and they seem to work well. But, being IT people we never can leave well enough alone. So let's use our own DNS server, at our hosting company. We will need to use their control panel to add all of our DNS records to the new name server. Minimally, we need to create the following records:

; Zone file for yada123.com
$TTL 14400
@      86400    IN      SOA     ns1.examplehost.com. hostmaster.examplehost.com. (   2009031602      ; serial, todays date+todays
   86400           ; refresh, seconds
   7200            ; retry, seconds
   3600000         ; expire, seconds
   86400 )         ; minimum, seconds

yada123.com. 86400 IN NS ns1.examplehost.com.
yada123.com. 86400 IN NS ns2.examplehost.com.

yada123.com. IN A 70.120.44.51

localhost.yada123.com. IN A 127.0.0.1

yada123.com. IN MX 0 yada123.com.

www IN CNAME yada123.com.

$TTL 14400	Is the default Time To Live (TTL) for records in this zone file
@ 86400 IN SOA ns1.examplehost.com. hostmaster.examplehost.com.	Is the TTL (86,400 seconds, which is 24 hours) of the SOA record, ns1.examplehost.com. The hostmaster.examplehost.com. is the email address for the administrator of this domain, you might think it should be hostmaster@examplehost.com but it has a {dot} instead of an ampersand when in the zone file..
yada123.com. 86400 IN NS ns1.examplehost.com. yada123.com. 86400 IN NS ns2.examplehost.com.	Are the two authoritative name servers for this zone.
yada123.com. IN A 70.120.44.51	Is the default A record for the zone, note there is nothing in front of the zone name. So if you type yada123.com instead of www.yada123.com you will get this IP address, 70.120.44.51.
www IN CNAME yada123.com.	Is the CNAME (alias or canonical name) record for www. When someone types www.yada123.com it will lookup www, find the CNAME that points to the A record yada123.com, which is 70.120.44.51.
yada123.com. IN MX 0 yada123.com.	This is the MX (mail exchanger) record. This is looked up by email servers that want to send email to yada123.com. Specifically this is telling the email server to make a connection to yada123.com. which is 70.120.44.51

As you start to digest this you will see that this is a very simple zone file. We will be digging into this specific example and what decisions are important and could cause pitfalls.

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