So there is this wonderful thing called DNS Glue I learnt about the other day and it is used to break circular references in DNS entries.
What is a circular reference I hear you ask?
It is when a subdomain (such as ns1) is used to tell there world where it’s parent is. The way DNS works when you ask for a domain is it starts at the TLD (say .com) and works its way down through the domain name. The first request is “where is .com”, the second is “Where is example.com” and the third and final is “where is ns1.example.com”. The problem here is ns1.example.com is responsible for telling the world where to find example.com.
This is where DNS Glue comes in, It tells the DNS system that “if you are looking for ns1.example.com to look at this IP address here”.
To do this on planet domains is simple enough. Log into your account (if you are a whitelabel reseller, go to the user who has the domain and grab the login details and then go to your reseller site and log in). Once there, find the domain you want to add the DNS Glue to and click the plus symbol and add the domain and IP address to the “Child Name Servers” box and then you are golden.
I did have an issue with this though as I used the Planet Domain API to set this initially and it did not sync correctly with the registrar. From the reseller whitelabel admin I was able to use the “sync” button on the domains page to resync the planet domains database with the registrars version and then set it up again and it worked!
A couple of links that I found that were very helpful where
- http://www.webdnstools.com/dnstools/articles/glue_records Provided a great intro for DNS Glue Records for me
- http://www.webdnstools.com/dnstools/domain_check Was great for making sure that the DNS was good
- http://www.intodns.com/ Which was great for verifying that the DNS servers were setup correctly