is there a way to manage DNS without being a sysadmin?

What is a good way to learn how to manage DNS settings?

• I manage several domain names and I always seem to be driving blind when it comes to setting nameservers and DNS (A records, MX records, CNAME aliases etc etc). There are lots of videos on YouTube that explain the whole DNS regime but the beast seems too complicated to learn in this way. Maybe we have to learn simply by trial and error and by communicating with our domain name hosting company.

• Answer:

  I can try to explain... The three most common ones are A Records, MX Records and CName A Records map domain names to IP addresses.  For example, points to 50.17.196.92. MX Records: Mail Exchanger (MX) Records tell one how to find the mail server.  MX records always point to a records.  I'll use a fake domain name in this example.  The MX record for, say, domain.com would point to mail.domain.com.  Then you would need to set up a new A Record to point mail.domain.com to the IP address of the mail server. A lot of companies have more than one mail server for redundancy and/or load balance.  So MX records may point to to multiple servers.  That's where the MX preference kicks in.  The lower the number, the higher priority.  Mail will always be sent to the server with the lowest preference number.  If it isn't available, it will go to the next highest priority etc. So in our exmaple, the mx record for domain.com may point to mail.domain.com with a priority of 10, and mail1.domain.com with a priority of 20.  Again, mail and mail1.http://domain.com would need their own A Records pointing at the correct IPs. Finally CNames are aliases that point to other A Records.  If you have a bunch of suddomains all pointing at the same IP address, rather than creating an A Record for them, you would create a CName for each one.  For example, usually the domain.com and www.domain.com point to the same IP.  In this case, you would set up an A Record for domain.com, pointing to the IP address.  Then, you create a CName for www.domain.com pointing to domain.com.  This way, if you ever need to change the IP Address for the A Record of domain.com, you only need to change it once.  Since www.domain.com is pointing to domain.com, it will see the new IP address as well. Those are the ones you will probably deal with the most.  There are other records such as TXT and PTR that are used primarily to prove your mail server isn't sending spam. Hope that helps.  If you have any questions, let me now.