Custom DNS - set A Records

[rskuse]

I have a problem that I don't really understand but I have been asked to sort out!!
As an IT training company we have just teamed up with "learnfish" to offer online ECDL training. The problem is we have been supplied an IP address which brings up the learnECDl frontpage by default. Somehow we need to configure our server to recognise an address that we wish to use(which will be greenmarch.net)and therefore display a different page our own frontpage on the server.
I have been reading about "A Records" which I believe allows you to assign hostnames to IP addresses but I'm not sure how this works.

I'm sorry if I haven't explained myself very clearly but like I said I'm struggling just a little to understand!

If anyone could help at all, I would much appreciate it.

Thankyou for your time,

Rachel

 

[GiaBetiu]

Hi Rachel,

Indeed is diffiult to follow what you are saying. But I suppose that is a quaetion about DNS.
I wil try to explain in the simplest way how the things are working there.
DNS role is to keep a database with asociations name-IPaddress (forward zone) and IPaddress-name (reverse lookout zone).
This database is organized in a hierarchical manner. Such a zone, can contain domains. Like: accounting.chicago.mycomp.com.
Every such a domain (mycomp, chicago, accounting) have some ResourceRecords (RRs). One type of resource record is type A. Type A is making a association name-IPaddress.
For example you can have a server in domain accounting, named srv1. Then in accounting domain you have to define (if it is not done via dynamic DNS...) an RR of type A that will say srv1=192.168.100.2 (or whatever address..).

Who is using DNS? IP protocol is using it as a name resolution protocol. When you are trying to type in your browser:

http://srv1.accounting.chicago.mycomp.com

then your computer (IPstack) will contact a DNS server first and ask it if it knows about "srv1.accounting...".
The DNS has to solve that query. It can answer to the client: not found. Or it can answer to the client with the address found in it's zone or from another linked DNS server.
Now, let say that you have in your domain a web server and you want to access it using a typical

http://www.domain.com.

That "

http://www"

is just an alias (RR type CNAME). So you have an A RR for your srv1, and you create an alias that is saying srv1=www.

Is my answer helping you? Gia Betiu
giabetiu@chello.nl
Computer Eng. CNE 4, CNE 5, soon MCSE2k

 

[rskuse]

Thankyou Gia Betiu, you have definitely helped me to understand DNS a little better! ;o) I think what you are saying is all true of what I need to do, so I will confer with my boss and hopefully get this working!!

Thanks again,

Rachel