Do CNAME records overrule A records?

Question

I have several A records like so:

Subdomain         IP Address
example.foo.com   1.2.3.4
foo.com           1.1.1.1

And a CNAME record that looks like this:

Alias          Destination
www.foo.com    foo.com

I want to make foo.com throw a 301 redirect to www.foo.com

So I'd change the last A Record to:

www.foo.com       1.1.1.1

And swap the two urls in the CNAME record to look like the following:

foo.com        www.foo.com

Question: Is this change going to make example.foo.com resolve to 1.1.1.1 instead of 1.2.3.4?

Answer 1

If you have an A record for example.foo.com then no DNS record for any other domain will affect that. So the answer is no.

Other facts to bear in mind:

You can't have a CNAME and an A record for the same fully qualified domain

A CNAME is not he same as a 301 redirect. A CNAME will return the same ip address as the new domain. Your browser will go to that ip asking for the original domain. A 301 redirect will cause your browser to do a DNS lookup for the new domain and then go and ask for the new domain.

Answer 2

like both of the comments said from avery and karol, you would not want to do this in DNS. there is different ways to do it in different configurations

if you have htaccess:

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
rewritecond %{http_host} ^domain.com [nc]
rewriterule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [r=301,nc]

a simple google search for 301 redirect will show you a bunch of different ways.

Answer 3

If you want to cause the HTTP server to send an HTTP response with status 301, then do that. Changing DNS entries isn't the way to implement a redirect in your HTTP server.