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Help an idiot with an email/nameserver setup query

Discussion in 'General Board' started by ian, Oct 12, 2016.

  1. martin-s United Kingdom

    martin-s Well-Known Member

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    For anyone else reading this thread, NS records and DNS records are different things.

    NS records (name servers) are held at the registry level, to tell you where to go and find DNS information.

    DNS records are held on the aforementioned name servers (and you don't need to duplicate the NS records there)

    A records point directly at IP addresses
    CNAME records point at A records (not quite as efficient as A records for looking up, but easier to maintain if lots point at the same IP. Not officially allowed for pointing MX at)
    MX records point at email hosts
    SPF and other records are informational only (for anti-spam and the like)

    A typical setup would be:

    A > domainname.co.uk > 127.0.0.1
    CNAME > www.domainname.co.uk > domainname.co.uk
    A > mail.domainname.co.uk) > 127.0.0.1
    MX > domainname.co.uk > mail.domainname.co.uk > 10 (priority)
     
  2. Domain Forum

    Acorn Domains Elite Member

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    IWA Meetup
     
  3. invincible

    invincible Well-Known Member

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    Those are glue records.

    NS records do belong in zone files. Each zone requires a NS entry detailing the name server hostname that hosts that zone (and one entry for each hostname if the zone is hosted with multiple name servers, as would be usual). Some GUI's may hide this from the user but these NS entries still have to exist in the underlying zone. Users of such GUI's may also not see the SOA but it still has to be within each zone.
     
    Last edited: Oct 13, 2016
  4. martin-s United Kingdom

    martin-s Well-Known Member

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    I thought glue records tied nameservers to IPs, rather than defined nameservers?

    I thought NS records at the DNS level were only required for delegated subdomains? Everything else being automatic by every DNS provider I've ever known.
     
  5. invincible

    invincible Well-Known Member

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    They do tie name server hostnames to IP addresses. Sorry I wasn't thinking about it fully. The registry holds the zone file for the gTLD or ccTLD and within that zone file will be NS records for all subdomains (i.e what we generally call domain names such as "example.gtld"). Each domain name within a gTLD or ccTLD zone file held by the registry must have one or more NS records, one record for each name server the domain name is delegated to. In addition, if the domain name's NS records are within the same zone then glue records designed to bind the name server record to an IP address must also exist within the gTLD or ccTLD zone.

    I have examined the plc.uk zone, because it's small and easy to load into a text editor quickly, and the first entry I came across with glue records is as follows (the glue records are of course the latter two lines):

    Code:
    freestart.plc.uk.    172800    IN    NS    ns0.freestart.plc.uk.
    freestart.plc.uk.    172800    IN    NS    ns1.freestart.plc.uk.
    ns0.freestart.plc.uk.    172800    IN    A    217.68.23.129
    ns1.freestart.plc.uk.    172800    IN    A    217.68.23.130
    I presume you've not edited zone files directly. :) I've been doing that today, although its back end is database driven. Here is a good explanation of why NS records appear in the zone and does a much better job of explaining it than what I had written out!

    Incidentally if one misses the NS records within a zone DNS resolution can still occur and all may appear fine, unless the zone file is queried directly. I've been fixing this today where NS entries had been missed from within some zones.

    If the zone itself also defines name server records that are within it then those name server entries must also have corresponding A record entries within the zone.

    One may also use NS records to sub delegate one or more subdomains within a zone to other name servers, as you have indicated.
     
  6. ian

    ian Well-Known Member

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    Well I decided to set up on a domain that just had a uniregistry holding page to see. I first included the domain within my tsohost server, added a test html page, then added the IP address of my server into DNSmadeeasy, then changed the nameservers via my Nom account....and....it worked, success!
     
  7. invincible

    invincible Well-Known Member

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    One can check the validity of a zone file and many of its records using a web tool such as this one.

    If you have made sure you've added the correct IP address of the web server for the @ and www A records, and you're sure you should be using A records and not CNAME records, because I've seen some hosts that do using CNAMES in part sometimes, by checking the former zone records with TSO, I presume something to do with the web site has not been configured correctly so the web server isn't recognising your domain name and returning the appropriate web site accordingly. Perhaps the zone also needs to be set up with TSO's name servers for it to be considered valid within their web server. I don't know how they've setup their systems, especially if it's control panel based so I'm guessing.

    This is genuinely a good exercise for you and others to go through. For one thing it may help you appreciate so much more about DNS than simply form filling to register domain names. :)
     
  8. ian

    ian Well-Known Member

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    Thanks David, you must have seen my post straight away, as I edited it 2 minutes later. It was an error on my part as to why that particular domain didn't work. For some reason my cpanel account had stopped assigning add-on domains to public_html by default, so the domain was pointing to a root location it had no rights to. Sorted that. Now setting up the transfer of the real domain!
     
  9. Adam H

    Adam H Well-Known Member

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    Thats an update for cpanel and one your host has accepted, addon domains now natively have their own folders below the public_html instead of in side it..............much better.
     
  10. ian

    ian Well-Known Member

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    Yeah, I'm sure it is better, but not when you've not noticed the change and are trying to battle understanding of setting up email :D In any case, my main domain is now operating through DNSmadeeasy and Google. Hasn't quite filtered through ISP yet, as emails are still going the old route, but I've received some in on the new, so I know it is getting there. One thing I found which was a pain, was that I already used the email address for other Google servers, and you cannot use the same for Gsuite, so I had to do some email name changes to sort it (but naturally went the long way around).

    That reminds me, I can change my email address on Acorn now to test, as I wasn't receiving PM notifications on the domain prior.
     
  11. BeachLife United Kingdom

    BeachLife Active Member

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    One nice feature of GSuite (I wish they would stop renaming their products!), is that you can receive and send email on as many domains as you like, without further charge, as long as the address to the left of the @ is the same.

    So if your account is set up as ian@primarydomain.co.uk, then add seconddomain.co.uk, thirddomain.co.uk etc as domain aliases and you can send and receive email using iian@ on all of them. Works on the App too.
     
  12. ian

    ian Well-Known Member

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    I actually found that you could add alternative email addresses from different domains under the same control, so not an alias. However, it does then requires you to have another sign in account. It is a decent tool, that's for sure, though takes a bit of setup to suit the way I operate, with many features that are already 'open' on a gmail account, requiring authorisation on this account.