Scenario:
You want to use GSLB.me as the authoritative DNS for your domain “mydomain.com“. mydomain.com can be a new domain you’re about to register, or it can be an already existing domain.
What you get:
- flexible IPv4 and IPv6 support
- support for A, AAAA, ALIAS, CAA, CERT, CNAME, LOC, MX, NS, RP, SOA, SPF, SRV, SSHFP, TXT records
- dynamic DNS support for as many FQDNs as you need
- configurable TTL for all records (subscribers only)
- support for wildcard records
- works with all Internet top level domains
- easy migration from your legacy DNS provider
- fast and advanced web user interface
- seamless configuration, no need to manage master and slave DNS servers
- globally distributed with no single point of failure so that your domains are always accessibile
- actively developed and supported
- two access models: totally free or subscription-based for additional features and flexibility
The first domain you configure on GSLB.me for authoritative DNS purposes is totally free.
How to configure it:
Log on to GSLB.me using your credentials or register if you still don’t have an account
Create a new “customer zone”: this is the domain name you want to handle using GSLB.me as your authoritative DNS. You can create a customer zone for a domain name you already own (in this case you will ask your registrar to modify the authoritative DNS it relies on) or for a domain name you still have to register (in this case you will tell your registrar to use GSLB.me as your domain’s authoritative DNS servers). Creating a new zone can be done either by clicking on the button you can find on the main page immediately after logging on to GSLB.me…
…or by right clicking in the main panel on the “Customer zones” section.
The “Zone edit” page allows you to create your domain: here you have to specify the domain name and the e-mail address of the contact person. This e-mail address will be used as the postmaster in the SOA record for your zone.
Once done, click on “Save” to create your zone. After saving, the left-hand side of the page will be updated showing your newly created zone:
The SOA and NS records for your zone have been automatically created. “2 rrsets” indicates that ns1.gslb.me and ns2.gslb.me have been defined as the “NS” records for your domain. You can check this using dig or similar tools:
On the left-hand side of the screen click on the domain you just created: this brings you to the main domain configuration page.
Here you can change the domain’s contact e-mail address and fully edit your domain records (also called rrsets). Records types A, AAAA, CNAME, LOC, MX, NS, RP, SOA, SPF, SRV, TXT are supported. In order to add a new record you simply have to type the record name, select the type from the dropdown menu and assign a value. TTL is set to 86400 seconds for free GSLB.me users. Subscribers can set it to anything in the 300-86400 seconds range.
In order to add a record for your zone you have to set the record name, select its type, define the value and set the TTL (free users can’t change TTL: it is set to 86400 seconds by default). When done, click “Add record” in order to save the new rrset.
After saving your record(s), it is displayed in the lower section of the page. In the example here the record name “www” is appended with the zone name: the actual record shown here is www.mydomain.com, and it points to IP address 1.2.3.4
It is required to click on “Save” when all records have been added to your zone. If you don’t do this, your records will be kept but they will not be active. Clicking the “Save” button applies changes and makes all records active and running.
You can now check to see if the newly configured record works fine:
After configuring all the records you need (free users are limited to 20 records, subscribers can use an unrestricted number of records per domain) you need to get back to your registrar and tell them that you want to use ns1.gslb.me and ns2.gslb.me as authoritative DNS for your domain (mydomain.com in this example).
Once this last step is completed you’re done! You domain is fully handled by GSLB.me and you can rely on all the features it provides.
When configuring a record you can use a FQDN (Fully Qualified Domain Name) as the record value: for instance record “@”, type “MX” can have a value of “10 myothermailserver.myotherdomain.com.”. If the record value ends with “.” it is used as it is. If it doesn’t end with “.” your zone name is added at the end of the specified record value. For instance record “@”, type “MX” can have a value of “10 mail”. This means that the Mail eXchanger for mydomain.com is mail.mydomain.com where “.mydomain.com” is added after “mail”.
One more last thing: in addition to using GSLB.me as your authoritative DNS of choice you can seamlessly mix static DNS resolution together with GSLB dynamic resolution to handle disaster recovery, business continuity, CDN offload, geographical balancing for one or more records in your domain (such “smart” records are referred to as “geohosts”). To achieve this, simply right click on your domain name and create your geohosts!
In order to discover the full power of geohosts you can read our other howtos.