What services do you provide?
the dns.widge provides real-time web-based managed primary and secondary dns services through an easy-to-use web-based administrative interface.
top
What are your terms of service?
these are listed here.
top
Why is this free?
We have built dns.widge out of our academic interest in dns. Our goal is to provide the lowest cost and highest quality DNS service.
top
How can I contact you?
Behold the contact page.
top
How reliable are your servers?
dns.widge is hosted at Rackspace managed hosting. The Rackspace world-class network and world-class data center are optimized to deliver your packets in the fastest, most efficient manner possible.
top
How can I get my password?
Regard the forgot password page.
top
What is DNS?
DNS maps domain names to its IP Address(es).
top
What is a domain name server?
Name servers translate Internet domain names to IP address numbers.
top
What is a valid hostname?
A hostname is a name given to a computer to make connecting to it easier.
Instead of the IP address you can type the hostname, like dns.widge.net.
Hostnames must be no longer than 255 characters in length. You can use a-z,0-9, and ‘-‘.
A hostname cannot have any spaces nor can it start with a number or ‘-‘.
more formally
<subdomain> ::= <label> | <subdomain> “.” <label>
<label> ::= <letter> [ [ <ldh-str> ] <let-dig> ]
<ldh-str> ::= <let-dig-hyp> | <let-dig-hyp> <ldh-str>
<let-dig-hyp> ::= <let-dig> | “-”
<let-dig> ::= <letter> | <digit>
<letter> ::= any one of the 52 alphabetic characters A through Z in upper case and a through z in lower case
<digit> ::= any one of the ten digits 0 through 9
top
What is a valid ip address?
An IP address is a unique number used to identify a host on the internet.
A valid IP address must be in the form of xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx, where xxx is a number from 0-255.
reserved addresses:
10.x.x.x
192.168.x.x
172.16.0.0 to 172.31.255.255
top
What is an “A” record?
“Address” record. A DNS entry that maps each domain name (e.g. example.com) or subdomain (e.g. xyz.example.com) to an IP Address. In other words, the A record specifies the IP address to which the user would be sent for each domain name. For example, you can have xyz.example.com point to one IP address, and pdq.example.com point to a different IP address.
top
What is an “MX” record?
“MX” (“Mail eXchanger”) records are used to specify where e-mail is sent for a particular domain name. In general, this will is often be the address of your web host, although it is not uncommon to give this a different name such as mail.example.com, so that it’s easy to move later should the web host and mail host become separate entitites. You can have several MX records for a single domain name, and they can be ranked in order of preference.
top
What is a “CNAME” record?
“Canonical Name” records, create an alias from a domain name to another. You could create an alias from “my.example.com” to “www.example.com”, and every reference to “my.example.com” would go to the other location, regardless how “www.example.com” changed IP addresses. CNAME records won’t work everywhere. If you create an MX record, and the name used for the mail server was defined using a CNAME, you might lose e-mail!
top
Where can I learn more?
googles DNS directory.
Ask Mr. DNS here..
O’Reilly publishes Dns and Bind.
rfc 1034 .
rfc 1035 .
The DNS Resources Directory.
top
What is a wild card DNS? Do you support it?
Wildcards allow anything typed before your hostname to be resolved to your IP address.
ex: *.example.com -> 1.2.3.4
foo.example.com will map to 1.2.3.4, as will anything.example.com
if you define other “A” records such as bar.example.com -> 1.2.3.5, they will take presidence over the wildcard.
Yes, to enable, enter a “*” or “*.subdomain” in the host field on the update zone page.
top
Do you support round-robin DNS?
Yes Simply create multiple “A” records with the same domain name and different IP addresses.
top
How do I enable secondary DNS service?
If you create a primary zone a secondary will be assigned to it and
the rest will be transparent to you.
If you want seconday services for an existing DNS server, create a secondary zone. You will
need to provide the ip address of your primary and configure that host to allow zone transfers
from the IP on the update screen.
top
How can I delete a zone?
Mark it as inactive if it is temporary or delete the thing with the delete clicky.
top
How do I set up reverse DNS?
Ask your ISP to add CNAME records to their DNS.
ex: 4.3.2.1.in-addr.arpa. IN PTR thenameyouwant.example.com
top
What DNS servers do I use for my domain?
Your servers will be assigned to you after you add a zone, they are listed at the top of the update zone page.
top
How can I check to see if my DNS is working?
some client programs you can use to check your entries include.
dig, host, nslookup etc.
host -t ns example.com
this should return the names of the nameservers we have assigned to you.
If it doesn’t the problem lies with the registrar of your domain.
keep in mind this can take some time to propagate.
host www.example.com ns1.widge.net
this will query ns1.example.com for www.example.com.
you can do look ups by resource record type:
host -t soa example.com ns1.widge.net
will return your start of authority record.
host -t mx example.com ns1.widge.net
will return your mx record(s).
host -la example.com ns1.widge.net
will perform a zone transfer returning your entire zone.
you will have to configure your zone to allow this query to the machine’s ip your running the query from.
With Mac OS X, you can check DNS using the above commands by firing up the BSD terminal window. For older mac versions, there is a utility called DNSLookup.
top
My mail is hosed, why?
do you have an mx record with no a record?
ex:
% host example.com
example.com has address 1.2.3.4
example.com mail is handled (pri=0) by mail.example.com
% host mail.example.com
Host not found, try again.
solve this by adding an a record for mail.example.com
do you have an a record for your zone?
% host mail.example.com
Host not found, try again.
solve this by adding an a record for example.com.
top
Delegating to dns.widge.net’s nameservers has failed.
Some registrars verify that DNS zone information is available on the new nameserver you are switching to. Make sure to add your zone data to the widge, prior to switching DNS records at your registrar.
top
I’ve changed my DNS servers to dns.widge.net, but my domain still isn’t working?
Please allow up to 72 hours for the DNS transfer to be completed. Your registrars DNS servers need to update their records for your domain. This should take between 12 to 72 hours. After 72 hours, please contact support@widge.net.
top
