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DNS Records
DNS Records
The domain name system (DNS) is integral to today's internet, and on the surface, it seems
extremely complex. It's little wonder that DNS confuses so many people. However, if you get to
know some of the most common DNS records – and how they're used – it's easy to get a sense of
how this technology works. Here we'll look at the 12 most common DNS records.
1. A Records
2. AAAA Records
As IPv6 becomes more prevalent, the AAAA record (or "quad-A") will become more
popular. This is simply the IPv6 equivalent of the IPv4 version, and it differs because IPv6 uses 128-
bit addresses. This means that AAAA records are notated using eight groups of 16-bit values, such as:
fe80:226:18ff:fed3::cc2a. (Learn more about the new IP infrastructure in The Trouble With IPv6.)
3. CNAME Records
Canonical records (CNAMEs) are useful for pointing one host name at another. This
eliminates the need for explicitly declaring an IP address and means that the IP address can be
changed once rather than twice if a CNAME record simply points at an already established host
name, as shown in the following example:
4. MX Records
5. NS Records
Each DNS zone (or publicly announced configuration of DNS settings) must contain
some indication of how the delegated DNS entries are run. The Start of Authority(SOA) record can
show the primary name server for the domain name, the serial number (this should be when the last
revision was made to the DNS configuration for the zone if it's shown in the correctly specified date
format), and other pertinent information relating to how the zone is run by the administrator.
7. RP
Also shown inside the SOA record is an email address of whom to contact, or the
responsible person (RP), in the event of a misconfiguration or some other issue relating to the DNS
zone. This might be something like hostmaster@techopedia.com.
8. TTL
Within the SOA, it's important to announce how other machines should react when
communicating with the authoritative name servers for a DNS zone. Such an example might be:
Here we see the domain name for techopedia.com's primary name server is ns10.dnsmadeeasy.com
and that the human contact is dns@dnsmadeeasy.com (note the @ sign is never shown in an SOA
entry but is instead implied). Finally, we can see its serial number (suggesting in this case that salient
changes haven't been made since 2009), followed by a number of time to live (TTL) values that
control how long data received from a name server might be trusted before being considered stale,
among other things.
9. SPF Records
With the ever problematic unsolicited mail issue on the internet, one common
method of combating it was to use DNS to declare which outbound mail servers were allowed to
send mail from a domain name. A Sender Policy Framework (SPF) record might look like this for that
reason:
Here we see a list of machines allowed to send email and some IP addresses as well.
These records can be used for a number of purposes, but a good example can been
seen here:
Google's site verification system has obviously needed a way to identify that a particular domain
name or host name belongs to an administrator during a configuration process request. In this case,
it has asked for DNS entries to be created to authenticate that request. Google most likely assumes
that only the owner of the domain name will have access to the name servers responsible for
running the domain name and therefore, only they will be able to make DNS changes to the domain
name.
An example PTR (or pointer) record delegated by an RIR to an authoritative name server that is
ready to answer reverse DNS queries might be as follows. Notice that the notation is reversed:
4.3.2.1.in-addr.arpa www.techopedia.com
Even among seasoned technical staff, the fact that reverse DNS is delegated by RIRs is sometimes
overlooked and missed during troubleshooting. The other record types are more straightforward.
DNS? No Sweat!
Although we have barely scratched the surface of the ins and outs of DNS and its clever functionality,
next time a web hosting company needs you to add an A record to your domain name's DNS for a
new website launch, you won't have to break a sweat.