MyBind

If you know BIND, you know MyBind.

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Name servers

On your domain registrar control panel, use the following name servers for your domain name:

Example zone

Name Type Aux Data
@ A 173.194.34.169
www CNAME @
mail A 65.55.58.201
@ MX 10 mail

In this example, the first A record points to your server IP. The 2nd CNAME record just points back to the 1st A record. The 3rd A record points to your mail server. Finally, the 4th MX record just points back to the 3rd A record.

Common BIND errors

Error Meaning
multiple RRs of singleton type Zone may have multiple CNAME records for a given name.
bad dotted quad A record does not have IP address value.
not a valid number MX record missing aux value (priority).

Use of dots/periods

The dot/period is useful when you want to use a fully qualified domain name (FQDN) in the data field. For example, if you wanted to use Google's mail server, then you would use ghs.google.com. in your data field (note the trailing dot/period).

For example:

Name Type Data
mail CNAME ghs.google.com.

TTL and caching

It's a common misconception that all DNS updates take 24 hours to update. This depends entirely on your TTL for the zone (or individual records). TTL stands for "time to live" (how long the data can live for as cache). With MyBind, you choose the TTL that works for you. When a DNS client (or an ISP's DNS server) downloads your zone data, it will cache it for as long as the TTL; lets say it's 300 seconds. After 300 seconds of being in the DNS client's cache, it will become stale and will no longer be used.

Adjusting the TTL can be useful for migrating websites to a different server with a new IP, where the site is using a database, and the old database must not be updated. You simply adjust the TTL to 120 seconds (2 minutes, which is the RFC recommended minimum), wait for any existing DNS client cache to expire, and then change the IP on the A record. This way, your maximum downtime is only 2 minutes. You could set the TTL to 1 second if you like, but this is sometimes regarded as risky.

Tips & Tricks

Use the Men & Mice DIG online website to test your DNS records - it's pretty good.