MyBind Help
Name servers
On your domain registrar control panel, use the following name servers for your domain name:
- ns1.mybind.com
- ns2.mybind.com
Example zone
| Name | Type | Aux | Data |
|---|---|---|---|
| @ | A | 173.194.34.169 | |
| www | CNAME | @ | |
| A | 65.55.58.201 | ||
| @ | MX | 10 |
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 |
|---|---|---|
| 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.