A Records

A Records are the most basic type of DNS record and are used to point a domain or subdomain
to an IP address. Assigning a value to an A record is as simple as providing your DNS
management panel with an IP address to where the domain or subdomain should point and a
TTL.

A Record listing in the GoDaddy DNS Management Panel.

The screenshot above is a sample of A Record listings of different types. You can see that the
wildcard ( * ), @ symbol, and named host name entries were used. Here, the primary naked
domain record (@) and blog subdomain point at the same IP address, but are separate records
and can be changed individually at any time. A Records are only able to take an IP address as
their value and you can point the same domain/subdomain to multiple IP addresses by adding
another A Record with the same name but with a different IP address for the value.

You’ll want to use an A Record for your DNS entry if you have an IP address that the
domain/subdomain should point to or if you want to establish a domain/subdomain to be used as
the place to point a CNAME. You can find out more about why you might want to do this in the
CNAME portion of this article.

CNAME
CNAME records are another commonly used type of DNS entry and are used to point a domain
or subdomain to another hostname.
CNAME record listing in the GoDaddy DNS Management Panel.

In the screenshot above, you can see immediately that one of the important differences from A
Records is that the value portion of the record is required to be an existing subdomain/domain.
You can see that the “journal” hostname points to my blog.iamrobertv.com A Record, which
points to 198.101.164.57. What this means is that, if the value of the blog’s subdomain is ever
changed, the journal subdomain’s value will also be changed.

As a host, we can use CNAMEs for customers as a means of being able to change the IP address
of a server or cluster of servers transparently and without users having to make their own DNS
adjustments. You can see an example of this in the store hostname that points to a cluster of
servers of servers that sit behind the thor.openhostingservice.com subdomain. Finally, you can
see the use of the @ symbol to indicate that the www hostname should point to the naked
domain and use its value, which when you see the A Record sample image above, points
to 198.101.164.57. This also means that, if the value of the naked/primary domain changes, the
record of www will end up being affected accordingly.

MX Record
Mail Exchanger (MX) records are used to help route email according the domain owners
preference. The MX record itself specifies which server(s) to attempt to use to deliver mail to
when this type of request is made to the domain. They differ from A Records and CNAMEs in
the way that they also require a “priority” value as a part of their entry. The priority number is
used to indicate which of the servers listed as MX records it should attempt to use first.

In the screenshot above, you can see that I am using two MX records that have separate priority
values and point to different subdomains. These subdomains are pointed at two different email
servers that are designated to handle email. The MX record with the lower priority number (“0”
in this case) is the first to be tried for email delivery. If this server is unable to handle the mail
request, the next lowest priority number is used, which in this case would be 10.

Some email providers have only one MX record and some have well over two. The number of
MX entries you will need to create depends largely on the mail provider and how they expect the
load on these email servers to be handled.

You’ll notice the host name here is designated as the naked/primary form ( @ ). If you wanted to
receive mail on a subdomain, you would adjust the hostname accordingly and ensure your email
provider is setup to handle email from the subdomain.

TXT Record
A TXT record is used to store any text-based information that can be grabbed when necessary.
We most commonly see TXT records used to hold SPF data and verify domain ownership.

TXT Record listing in the GoDaddy DNS Management Panel.

The screenshot above gives an example of how a TXT value would be formed for both an SPF
entry or a ownership verification for the naked/primary host/name using the @ symbol. If you
need to verify or provide an SPF record for a specific subdomain, then you will need to use the
appropriate hostname in place of the @ symbol. The rule of thumb for TXT records is that they
require a an attribute name, follow by an equals sign, followed by a value for the attribute. You
can use this to relay any sort of information you’d like using a DNS record, so long as you have
a purpose for it and the record is properly formatted.

We won’t go into the details of properly formed SPF records and what their different pieces
mean, but these will commonly be supplied to you by the mail provider you are working with. In
the same way, places that require domain verification through use of a TXT record will also
provide you with a properly formatted TXT record value to use.

Final Thoughts
Managing your own DNS can be a tricky endeavor, especially if you haven’t ever considered
what this means or ever even seen a DNS record. Ideally this series of articles will help you
understand the general how a website’s DNS works for a domain from the time it is typed into
the browser to the time your name servers handle the request. Although it can be rather easy to
understand the record types themselves, knowing about nameservers, registrars, and how a
specific set of DNS records gets chosen and used is a little more difficult to navigate, but is just
as essential to know.

Description
Online DNS Record Viewer makes it easy to view all kinds of Domain Name System (DNS)
records. The DNS is crucial system for today's Internet. Incorrectly set up DNS records cause
many different problems to administrators of web servers and company infrastructure. Online
DNS Record Viewer can be used to check various DNS records on arbitrary DNS servers.

Online DNS Record Viewer can become handy even if you are not a server administrator. As a
common user you might want to investigate why are you unable to reach a certain web site while
your friends have no problems with it. With Online DNS Record Viewer you check the records
of your Internet service provider's (ISP) DNS server and compare it with the information from
the target domain's authoritative DNS server and you find out that your ISP's server is poorly
configured or just holds the old version of the record in its cache. You can also reveal how
systems such as opendns.com work under the hood.

Usage
Fill in the Host / IP address field with the domain name or IP address you want to query about.
Specify a name server of your choice in the DNS server field, or just leave the "Default" value
there to use one of our DNS servers. Then, in the Query type field, select the type of DNS record
you are interested in and click the "Query!" button to get your result.

If you want to receive authoritative answer rather than non-authoritative enable the Require
authoritative answer option. Online DNS Record Viewer will try to contact the authoritative
name server for the specified query and obtain the authoritative answer for you. The specified
name server will be used to find the authoritative name server. If Online DNS Record Viewer
fails to obtain the authoritative answer it will automatically try to get at least a non-authoritative
answer from the specified name server.

DNS Resource Records

Zone DNS database is a collection of resource records and each of the records provides
information about a specific object. A list of most common records is provided below:
 Address Mapping records (A)

The record A specifies IP address (IPv4) for given host. A records are used for
conversion of domain names to corresponding IP addresses.

 IP Version 6 Address records (AAAA)

The record AAAA (also quad-A record) specifies IPv6 address for given host. So it
works the same way as the A record and the difference is the type of IP address.

 Canonical Name records (CNAME)

The CNAME record specifies a domain name that has to be queried in order to resolve
the original DNS query. Therefore CNAME records are used for creating aliases of
domain names. CNAME records are truly useful when we want to alias our domain to an
external domain. In other cases we can remove CNAME records and replace them with A
records and even decrease performance overhead.

 Host Information records (HINFO)

HINFO records are used to acquire general information about a host. The record specifies
type of CPU and OS. The HINFO record data provides the possibility to use operating
system specific protocols when two hosts want to communicate. For security reasons the
HINFO records are not typically used on public servers.

Note: Standard values in RFC 1010

 Integrated Services Digital Network records (ISDN)

The ISDN resource record specifies ISDN address for a host. An ISDN address is a
telephone number that consists of a country code, a national destination code, a ISDN
Subscriber number and, optionally, a ISDN subaddress. The function of the record is only
variation of the A resource record function.

 Mail exchanger record (MX)

The MX resource record specifies a mail exchange server for a DNS domain name. The
information is used by Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) to route emails to proper
hosts. Typically, there are more than one mail exchange server for a DNS domain and
each of them have set priority.

Example:

msn.com MX preference = 5, mail exchanger = mx2.hotmail.com

msn.com MX preference = 5, mail exchanger = mx3.hotmail.com
msn.com MX preference = 5, mail exchanger = mx4.hotmail.com
msn.com MX preference = 5, mail exchanger = mx1.hotmail.com
 msn.com nameserver = ns3.msft.net
msn.com nameserver = ns5.msft.net
msn.com nameserver = ns4.msft.net
msn.com nameserver = ns1.msft.net
msn.com nameserver = ns2.msft.net
mx1.hotmail.com internet address = 65.55.92.184
mx1.hotmail.com internet address = 65.54.188.72
mx1.hotmail.com internet address = 65.54.188.94
mx1.hotmail.com internet address = 65.54.188.110
mx1.hotmail.com internet address = 65.54.188.126
mx1.hotmail.com internet address = 65.55.37.72
mx1.hotmail.com internet address = 65.55.37.88
mx1.hotmail.com internet address = 65.55.37.104
mx1.hotmail.com internet address = 65.55.37.120
mx1.hotmail.com internet address = 65.55.92.136
mx1.hotmail.com internet address = 65.55.92.152
mx1.hotmail.com internet address = 65.55.92.168

 Name Server records (NS)

The NS record specifies an authoritative name server for given host.

 Reverse-lookup Pointer records (PTR)

As opposed to forward DNS resolution (A and AAAA DNS records), the PTR record is
used to look up domain names based on an IP address.

 Start of Authority records (SOA)

The record specifies core information about a DNS zone, including the primary name
server, the email of the domain administrator, the domain serial number, and several
timers relating to refreshing the zone.

 Text records (TXT)

The text record can hold arbitrary non-formatted text string. Typically, the record is used
by Sender Policy Framework (SPF) to prevent fake emails to appear to be sent by you.