DNS records to have website on different server

Question

I've been asked by my client to set up their website on a different server to where their domain currently points to. They have their email and the domain name hosted with one company at the moment including a small amount of web space that came with their email account (Had no PHP or MySQL or anything so that why I'm now hosting their website). Only issue is, when I went and changed their Zone file DNS records it was pointing to my server correctly but it broke their email as well. I havent had much experience with DNS Records and I can't, after Googling almost non-stop for 2 days, find a solution.

The current Zonefile is below. I've changed the IP address and the domain name for privacy reasons.

example.com.au.          86400 IN TXT   "google-site-verification=dvMaqYAUGx_lDAu1ZqzexAleM75znUU-GQ1AJLvA41w"
example.com.au.          86400 IN NS    ns32b.ssggrp-wc.com.
example.com.au.          86400 IN NS    ns32a.ssggrp-wc.com.
www.example.com.au.      300   IN MX    150 mail.example.com.au.
example.com.au.          300   IN MX    100 ASPMX2.GOOGLEMAIL.COM.
example.com.au.          300   IN MX    100 ASPMX3.GOOGLEMAIL.COM.
example.com.au.          300   IN MX    150 mail.example.com.au.
example.com.au.          300   IN MX    50 ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM.
example.com.au.          300   IN MX    75 ALT1.ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM.
example.com.au.          300   IN MX    75 ALT2.ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM.
www.example.com.au.      86400 IN A     205.123.456.789
webmail.example.com.au.  86400 IN A     205.123.456.789
smtp.example.com.au.     86400 IN A     205.123.456.789
example.com.au.          86400 IN A     205.123.456.789
mail.example.com.au.     86400 IN A     205.123.456.789
ftp.example.com.au.      86400 IN A     205.123.456.789
cp.example.com.au.       86400 IN A     205.123.456.789

I tried changing the "www.example.com.au" and "example.com.au" 'A' records to my IP address and it worked for the website but it broke their email. I can't do it again and get it wrong as they can't afford to not have email functioning while it propagates.

Answer 1

You are using Google Apps for domains I see, however, you got a subdomain mail,webmail and smtp pointing to something else then a google-server.

One of these should be a CNAME for the webmail application pointing to ghs.google.com.

Then you also have an MX record for www.example.com.au. which implies you have user using email like this: user@www.example.com.au. That seems a bit odd. Are you hosting the email servers for a subdomain yourself?

Also, while you are doing changes to various records, it's adviced to lower the TTL values to make the propagation go faster in case of changes.

Answer 2

Embarrassing but I better close off this question. The issues was with my server as I had set up the domain name of my client as a parked domain name. When I sent email using my server it looked for the email accounts locally (I forgot this happened) but they were hosted on different servers. Their email hadn't broken as I'd thought. Changing the two A records as I originally described did in fact make the necessary redirects.