The domain name system(DNS) is crucial to today’s internet. However, it might seem complex and can confuse a lot of people. Here in this article today we will be explaining the major and most common DNS Records and how they are used.
A Records: It is used to associate a domain name with an IP address. These can be in the form of many different hostnames and subdomains. The A record can be defined in by looking up which IP address is associated with a domain name in this way occurs through a forward DNS lookup or a query.
CNAME Record: These are very useful for pointing one hostname at another. This eliminates the need of declaring an IP address and means that the IP address can be changed once rather than twice if a CNAME record points at an already established hostname.
MX Records: MX Records are used by the mail servers when emails need to be configured and delivered. It is very easy to configure using a simple hierarchy, where an administrator can define the mail server to receive mail and so on.
NS Records: At the root server level it is important to configure an authoritative name server to respond to the queries against a particular domain name. Each domain should have a name server record defined and set up to function.
SOA Records: SOA stands for the start of authority. Each DNS Zone must contain some indication of how the delegated DNS entries should run. Hence this record shows the primary name server for the domain name, along with the serial number and other important information related to the DNS zone.
RP Record: RP stands for the responsible person. This record is indexed under the SOA record and contains the detail for the contact person in the event of the misconfiguration or some other issues related to the DNS zone.
TXT Records: This record type can be used for some purposes. The google site verification system needs a way to identify the particular domain name or hostname belongs to an administrator during a configuration process request. Thus it has asked for DNS entries to be created to authenticate the request. Google assumes that only the owner of the domain name will have access to the name server responsible for running the domain name and therefore they will only be able to make the changes to the domain name.
Although we have summed up the major record types of the DNS and its functionality, next time when you are configuring or validating the DNS records you can easily do the required changes.
