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I'm currently hosting a subdomain for a charity on Dreamhost. The charity is in control of the DNS records, and they're slow to update them.

So for example.com:

www.example.com -> A-record webserver
mail.example.com -> A-record mail server

About a year ago, I asked them to create:

foo.example.com -> A-record to 173.236.135.58 (Dreamhost's particular web server)

Trouble is, Dreamhost could change that server's IP at any time. The charity is slow to change records, so this could create an extended outage.

Should this be an NS record? e.g., 

foo.example.com -> NS-record ns1.dreamhost.com, ns2.dreamhost.com, ns3.dreamhost.com
ns[1-3].dreamhost.com -> foo.example.com is 173.236.135.58

Or is there another way to do this which I'm missing...? It might seem like an elementary question, but I'd like to get them to correct the record and add a new one, and I'd rather their site kept running :-)

mgjk
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  • Don't make it an NS record!! That will break stuff! – Tim Jan 17 '12 at 18:03
  • How? isn't this what NS records are *for*? Delegating the subdomain's records to the nameservers at a third party? ns[1-3].dreamhost.com all have the right entries, foo.example.com just needs to instruct the resolver to consult them for the info. – mgjk Jan 17 '12 at 18:32
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    Maybe I misread it. I read it as "To fix my dynamic IP, I should create an NS record". If Dreamhost is going to maintain the record, than there will be no problem setting them as the NS. – Tim Jan 17 '12 at 21:24

1 Answers1

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I suggest finding something like dyndns.org for keeping track of the changing IP address, dyndns.org will automatically update a free dns subdomain for you.

Then, have your charity create a DNS CNAME record to point to the dynamic domain name you chose with dyndns.org.

This method will require only the 1 change to be done by the charity, everything else will happen automatically.

Note: I have only used dyndns for personal free usage, I am unsure if there will be a small fee for using with some sort of organization like a charity.

Tim
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