MX and A name

mail routing

[click watcher]

i want to direct a domain name to an ip address that i have.

so i have changed the A name record to point

newdomainname.com to xxx.xx.xxx.xx

ok so far so good (i hope)

question 1: will my webhost be able to tell that i've pointed the name at my webspace/ip address ... i'm not using my hosts nameservers but am using other nameservers.
i'm on win2k and using server.transfer can route any requests to a subfolder,
the question comes as my host allows me to point a certain number of domains at my space using their dns and i'm on the limit.

secondly if i wanted to recieve mail from the newdomainname in the form

[e-mail]

how should i set up the mx name

my guess is

newdomainname.com >> primaryhosteddomainname.com

any clues am i on track or not??

[toolman]

>>>question 1:

Not sure if they can tell but it ultimately is a violation of the TOS no doubt...whether they care or not may be a different story.

As far as the MX thing I'm not a server admin by any means but I think it needs to be mapped to the new domain something like:

webmail.yodomain.com A 11.22.33.44
mail.yodomain.com CNAME yodomain.com
yodomain.com MX 10 mail.yodomain.com

At least thats the way my accounts are set up.

[click watcher]

thanks for the input toolman

>violation of the TOS no doubt

i guess you're right, i'm putting up a couple of holding pages, so i'm hoping they don't care.

[bird]

If the hosting company is suspicious about you, then they will find a way to figure out which domains are pointed to their machine, assuming they know what they're doing. But they probably need an initial reason to trigger such an investigation. It would be much simpler for them to just check the configuration of the machine in question for unnecessary server.transfer entries once in a while.

As far as the MX thing I'm not a server admin by any means but I think
it needs to be mapped to the new domain something like:

webmail.yodomain.com A 11.22.33.44
mail.yodomain.com CNAME yodomain.com
yodomain.com MX 10 mail.yodomain.com

The detour over the alias (CNAME) record is unnecessary, and in this circular combination probably won't work. All you need is to point the MX record to an address (A) record. The important point is, that there really must be an IP address at the end of the chain, or the sending system won't know where to drop the mail.

Of course, if you don't administrate the target system yourself, then it probably still won't work. The mailserver on the host at 11.22.33.44 must be set up to actually accept mail for yodomain.com. If it is not specifically configured that way (which has nothing to do with DNS), then it will bounce it.

So in short, if you're colocating your own hardware with them, then your little scheme might work. If they are actually administrating the system, then I wouldn't recommend to try. There are really enough cheap hosting possibilities out there for parking a domain.

[click watcher]

thanks bird...

exactly right as it turns out.

the problem is as you said

>>>mailserver on the host at 11.22.33.44 must be set up to actually accept mail for yodomain.com.

so infact the mail gets routed there fine but gets rejected by the mailserver on the host if not configured.... thats what happened.

>>>> then your little scheme might work

trouble is i'm a natural schemer!!! probably why i'm still flying small time and not big time.