Once an 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 BLUEHILL.com NT Web server:
; Nameservers
;
IN NS ns1.4servers.com. ; 168.143.168.1
IN NS ns2.4servers.com. ; 168.143.171.129
;
; Domain Mail Handlers
;
yourdomain.com. IN MX 0 mail
yourdomain.com. IN MX 10 mail
;
;
; hosts in order
;
yourdomain. IN A Your.IP.XXX
www IN A Your.IP.XXX
smtp IN CNAME www
pop IN CNAME www
ftp IN CNAME www
mail IN A Your.IP.XXX
;
; end
The first two lines show that two 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 your Internet provider some time to receive that new information and to store it in their DNS tables.
The third and fourth lines are called the MX records, and tells all mail coming to yourdomain.com to point to your mail server.
The next line is an “A” record that gives the IP address for your your domain.
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.
As shown in this DNS record, it is possible to point each cname to a different machine. The @ symbol says to associate a particular cname to the IP address above it. Both smtp and pop point to your domain, while ftp and mail also point to the NT Web server. The IP address given for the www canonical is the address of the NT Web server.
To view the statistics for your Web site, you would need to type in the URL "http://yourdomain.com/stats/" in your Web browser, replacing yourdomain.com with your actual domain name. Then, you would login into Webtrends using your UserID, which is the same as the username that was assigned to you.
When used in conjunction with Virtual Hosting, a cname can point to a specific directory of your NT Web server. For more on this, please refer to Section 18.4.2, Canonical Domain Names as Virtual Hosts.
