Solo Technology

Our domain at work is handled by Network Solutions (yeah yeah, I know, don’t start with me. I inherited them!) We also use netsol’s name servers for all our DNS management.

So, I have entries like:

(the a.b.c.d groupings just represent various “real” IP addresses of my servers. You can see from the MX and CNAME records that we use Google Hosting)

Now we want to add a blog. Since I’m most familiar with WordPress that choice wasn’t too tough. And since I’m most comfortable with hosting it on a LAMP stack, that choice wasn’t too tough either.

But I don’t want to be the guy managing the LAMP servers so we bought some hosting. Shared hosting to start with — who knows what our little blog{s} will have for volume? Shared will likely be just fine and the price is right.

Now, I initially added another CNAME record for blog.domain.com and pointed it over to the shared hosting domain. But that doesn’t work. Presumably because I don’t have a dedicated IP?

And since I don’t have a dedicated IP, I can’t add another type A record for “blog”

I think I might have to manage all my DNS stuff from the shared hosting company just to make this work. Maybe, I’m not even sure about that… I want to keep all services and subdomains just where they currently are and add this new subdomain on the shared host.

Any DNS wonks out there reading this? I’m still researching, but I wouldn’t mind suggestions!

4 Responses to “Today’s Stumper - DNS”

1. Chris on February 29th, 2008 1:48 pm
   

   From a twitter friend:

   cname to the provided hostname (must have one) .htaccess magic to make the browser see your domain name? A start, maybe?

   OK, so I pinged my shared host name and got the IP. Then I did a ping-a to get the “real” host name. I used that for the CNAME. Same issue….

2. Chris on February 29th, 2008 8:23 pm
   

   I took the easy way out and switched name servers (and the corresponding management) over to the host where we have the shared hosting account.

   (Arguably) Not the ideal solution, but it works for now while I ponder other avenues.

3. Trent on March 1st, 2008 8:52 am
   

   Have you examined how this is done on wordpress.com Chris? It seems to me that just adding a CNAME entry with the full subdomain is what you need to do?

4. Chris on March 1st, 2008 11:08 am
   

   @Trent - believe it or not, yep I did check out the WP.com docs.

   In fact, the CNAME approach you mention was the first thing I tried. Must be some interesting wrinkle with the new hosting firm.

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