DNS Manager Help

Adding a Domain to your Profile

Click Add New Domain from the Domain List screen to add a new domain to your profile. New domains added to your profile will not automatically be activated in our DNS system.

To activate a domain, have your credit card handy and click on the domain name to bring up the Records List screen and then click on the Activate Your Domain here link.

Adding Records to a Domain

From the Domain List screen, click on the domain name you wish to add records to. The Records List screen for the domain you selected is now displayed. You can now click on one of the records to edit it, or click on Add New Record to add a new record to your domain.

Available Record types:

Wild Cards:

Expire or Activate a record by date & time!

You can now expire a record on a certain date and time, or add a record that only becomes active after a certain date and time. This is an advanced feature and should only be used by those who understand the concept of Time To Live's (TTLs) as used in the DNS environment.

Here is a brief explanation of the concept of TTL's: In order to reduce the delay and traffic involved in a DNS query, a clients computer will point to a local DNS caching server, usually provided by your ISP. This server is responsible for finding and storing (or caching) information about the record you are looking for. If the caching server does not know the answer to your query, it starts a process, that involves several servers, looking up the information you seek from the "authoritative" DNS server(s) for your domain. Because your using our DNS Manager, our network of servers are considered to be ""authoritative" for your domain. When a caching server asks us for information, we return it with an added piece of information, the TTL. This TTL instructs the calling server to remember, or cache, the answer for a set amount of time, after which the caching server can expire the information and if it is needed again at some point in the future, starts the lookup process again.

There are many schools of thought on how long a TTL should be set. Too short a TTL and your clients are forced to deal with the delays involved in getting an answer from an authoritative DNS server, making it appear that your server is slow. Too long a delay and changes made to your records (when you change a servers IP address for example) won’t be visible to caching servers until they expire out the old information.

We chose to keep resource records set to the TinyDNS default values of 24 hours. This allows you to keep your address information up close to your clients, allowing them faster access to your servers, while reducing the delays of recursive resolution. These values work great for most people, most of the time. After all, if your information hasn't changed, why force clients to keep asking for the same information, over and over again, right!? But what happens when you need to change your information? If your changing your servers IP address, you want a seamless transition from the old information to the new. Here is where Expire/Activate time-stamps come in!

In the red section below, you have the ability to set either an expire or activate date for this record. Create two identical records (with different IP's of course!), one with an expiry date, the other with an activate date, set them to the same date stamp and our servers will now dynamically adjust the TTL's for your records so that they are not cached past the exipry time you specify, or activated at the time of your choosing!

Other Notes on the Expire/Activate feature:

  1. Since our default TTL is 24 hours, be sure to setup your expiring record at least 24 hours in advance, to avoid caching servers from keeping your old information beyond your desired expire time.
  2. We publish data to our servers 3 times an hour (every 20 mins), keep this in mind when wanting start times less than 20 minutes away.
  3. All times are UTC, sometimes called GMT. If your not sure what time zone your in, check the top of the Edit Record page, it displays the current time as of when the page was loaded. Compare this to your current time and now you know how far off UTC time you are!
  4. When a record has an activate or expire entry associated with it, you will see that record highlighted in yellow on the Domain Records Page. This is to remind you that this record has this feature active.

Example Zone configuration:

Here is an example of some domain records for “mydomain.com”. An explanation follows: