Dns question

[Andrew Hodgson]

Hi,

I think the mistake you are making is to think of a domain as www.domain.com whereas this is incorrect.  If you surf the net you will find plenty of sites with the URL of http://domain.com, or even something more obscure - for example, some ISPS provide homepages for users, and give the url of http://users.isp.com/username/, which is on a different server that runs the main website, which is on a different IP address and given the DNS record www.domain.com.

When you start a DNS zone, you start with a SOA record and nothing else.  You need to create A records, which point names at IP addresses.  Here is some entries from my zone hodgsonfamily.org:

hodgsonfamily.org.
www A 194.222.80.58
gollum a 194.222.80.58

So you can access my site via http://www.hodgsonfamily.org, or http://gollum.hodgsonfamily.org.  This would work, except for the fact I forgot that I put a virtual hosts setup on my webserver, so the later page will fail, but it will fail with an error from my webserver.

Thanks.
Andrew.