[TriLUG] Home DNS

[David Burton]

If you use ZoneEdit, then they'll run your nameservers, but nothing else.

Most folks use nameservers run by whoever hosts their web site.  A problem
with that is that if you move your web site hosting elsewhere, you probably
lose your nameservers... which makes it hard to move your web hosting...
which is probably why web hosting companies like to also host your
nameservers and generally offer to do so for free.

By using independent nameservers (zoneedit), you get complete control over
your nameservers.  So if your hosting service goes flakey, you can change
your DNS info to point to a different hosting service without even having a
conversation with the flakey company.

You can even host your site on two different hosting services, and ZoneEdit
will resolve lookups "round-robin" to both of them.  For a small extra cost,
they'll also sell you "failover service," which monitors your servers to see
that they stay up, and when they go down it automatically adjusts the DNS
entries to direct your traffic to a different IP of your choice.

So use a registrar like GoDaddy or NameCheap or whoever to REGISTER your
domain name.

Then when you register your domain name, you tell the registrar that your
nameservers are the ones that zoneedit told you to use for that domain.
 E.g., for burtonsys.com I have these three:   NS1.ZONEEDIT.COM,
NS2.ZONEEDIT.COM, NS14.ZONEEDIT.COM.

Then at ZoneEdit you log in and enter the appropriate A records, MX records,
etc. for your domain (and subdomains), according to where your web servers,
mailservers, etc., reside. At ZoneEdit, you configure that DNS records
however you wish: set an MX to point to gmail, set the A record(s) to
hosting services or to your server in your home, etc..

For Dynamic DNS, ZoneEdit's A record for your domain will need to be updated
if your home server's IP address changes, of course.  ZoneEdit supports
that, but you will probably need to run a script on your server to detect
the IP address changes and send the updates to ZoneEdit, since I don't think
most routers have built-in support for ZoneEdit's dynamic DNS.

ZoneEdit even supports multi-homed dynamic DNS, if you want to run multiple
servers for the same domain.  I don't think anyone else does.  They
implemented this feature at my request, quite a few years ago, when I had
flakey roadrunner and flakey DSL both at my house.  (Using that that unusual
feature would, of course, definitely require that you write a script to do
the DNS updates when the IP addresses change.)

Dave


On Wed, Jun 22, 2011 at 1:47 PM, fumiko <fumiko at trilug.org> wrote:

> On 6/22/2011 1:31 PM, David Burton wrote:
>
>> I use ZoneEdit for DNS service, and have for many years.  It's free for
>> the
>> 1st 2 domain names, and they do support dynamic-DNS updates.  (There are
>> various extra-price options you can buy, such as failover monitoring,
>> additional nameservers, 3rd/4th/5th/etc. domain names, etc., but the
>> prices
>> are very reasonable.)
>>
>> While you can't mix CNAME and MX records, you can mix A and MX records.
>>  You
>> just need to update the A record when roadrunner changes your IP.
>>
>> Dave
>>
> OK, so I can use my existing dynamic DNS address (or may need to move to
> ZoneEdit) and point my GoDaddy A Record to the domain name I get from DynDNS
> or ZoneEdit while my MX Record points to Gmail?
>
> Thanks!
>
>