DNS
Zone Files
Once a NIC agency has a domain name registered
and has information about which name servers
are authoritative for a domain, the authoritative
name servers need to have the information
about the IP addresses that correspond to
the domain loaded into its DNS tables. This
information is called a DNS Record or zone
file.
Although you will never be
required to edit a DNS record directly, you
may be interested in seeing what one looks
like. The following is a sample DNS record,
showing the two IP addresses associated with
your account (Web server and mail server),
as well as the IP address for your site
statistics and Control Panel.
_____________________________________________________________
IN NS ns1.nameserve.net.
IN NS ns2.nameserve.net.
IN NS ns3.nameserve.net.
IN MX 10 mail.mydomain.com.
IN A 216.122.37.XX
localhost IN A 127.0.0.1
smtp IN CNAME mail
pop IN CNAME mail
www IN A 216.122.37.XX
ftp IN CNAME www
mail IN A 216.122.34.XXX
stats IN A 216.122.37.2
plesk IN A 209.203.247.XXX
_____________________________________________________________
The first three lines show
that three name servers are responsible
for being authoritative. Please note that
the information you enter into the name
tables of the authoritative name server
is not necessarily immediately available
to your provider’s name servers. Because
your local provider controls how often they
update the name tables on their name servers,
these changes may not show for several hours,
or even several days. Even if a domain name
is properly registered with your NIC agency,
it may take Internet provider some time
to receive that new information and to store
it in their DNS tables.
The fourth line is called
the MX record, and tells all mail coming
to mydomain.com to point to your mail server.
The remaining lines contain A records and
cnames (short for canonical names). You
can think of these as prefixes that can
be used with your domain name, such as www.yourdomain.com,
ftp.yourdomain.com or mail.yourdomain.com.
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