Seeking advice on domain registation and DNS management

Question

We register lots of domain names for our clients and then need to setup simple but (perhaps) non-standard DomainKeys etc.

Please can anyone recommend any one-stop-shop companies who offer price-sensitive domain registration who can then back it up with good DNS management?

Answer 1

We use enom ourselves and they do a pretty good job. We have a couple of hundred domains that are all basically set up the same. enom allow you to create a domain folder that contains the settings to apply to any domain within it. You can override the settings on a domain per domain basis if you wish. Works really well for those of us managing huge numbers of almost identically configured domains.

Answer 2

An alternative to using an external DNS provider is to use microsoft DNS server on your own hardware and just create a batch file which runs a series of commands against the DNS server to add and configure the zones. Very good if you want to manage a lot of domains which are identical. If something needs to be different for a particular domain you can just logon to the microsoft DNS server and make changes as you need.

Sample DNS script to add a domain and add all its records is below:

@echo off


REM set PRISERVER=10.100.100.5
set PRISERVER=DNSSVR1
set PRISERVERPUB=55.55.100.5

set SECSERVER=DNSSVR2
set SECSERVERPUB=66.66.100.6
set OUTPUTTXT=output.txt

echo Zone being added: %1 > %outputtxt%

REM Add the new zone and add A, MX and TXT
dnscmd %PRISERVER% /zoneadd %1 /primary /file %1.dns >> %outputtxt%
dnscmd %PRISERVER% /recordadd %1 @ A 55.55.100.70 >> %outputtxt%
dnscmd %PRISERVER% /recordadd %1 @ MX 10 mail.%1. >> %outputtxt%
dnscmd %PRISERVER% /recordadd %1 @ TXT "v=spf1 IP4:55.55.100.72 -all" >> %outputtxt%

REM Add domain key and DKIM records
dnscmd %PRISERVER% /recordadd %1 _domainkey TXT "t=n; o=~; n=commenthere" >> %outputtxt%
dnscmd %PRISERVER% /recordadd %1 selector._domainkey TXT "k=rsa; p=yourkeygoeshere==" >> %outputtxt%

REM Delete existing NS records and add DNSSVR1 and DNSSVR2
dnscmd %PRISERVER% /recorddelete %1 @ NS /f >> %outputtxt%
dnscmd %PRISERVER% /recordadd %1 @ NS ns1.domain.com. >> %outputtxt%
dnscmd %PRISERVER% /recordadd %1 @ NS ns2.domain.com. >> %outputtxt%

REM Add new SOA record
dnscmd %PRISERVER% /recordadd %1 @ SOA ns1.domain.com hostmaster.domain.com 2 900 600 86400 600 >> %outputtxt%

REM Add DNSSVR2 into allowed list for zone transfer
dnscmd %PRISERVER% /zoneresetsecondaries %1 /securelist %SECSERVERPUB% >> %outputtxt%

REM Add a slave zone on secondary nameserver
dnscmd %SECSERVER% /zoneadd %1 /secondary %PRISERVERPUB% /file %1.dns >> %outputtxt%

This does assume that you have unfirewalled connectivity to the 2nd DNS server over VPN or similar and are therefore able to run the microsoft command line DNS commands against both primary and secondary DNS servers from a single machine.

The user you run this batch file as must have administration access to both your primary and secondary DNS servers.

Worth noting this script will also log out any errors into the output.txt file for you to review incase something goes wrong.

Hope this helps.