Dealing With DNS

2014-10-10

When I registered my website wmmclarke.com, I had no idea what a DNS was. According to wikipedia, the Domain Name Sysstem (DNS) is a hierarchical distributed naming system for computers, services, or any resource connected to the Internet or a private network. Not exactly immediately obvious…

The most common analogy for DNS records is probably a phonebook, which translates addresses that computers like (93.184.216.119) to addresses that humans like (wikipedia.org).

See my post about IP addresses.

This link is especially good at dealing with what happens when you navigate to a URL.

Anyway… I’m getting sidetracked. I’m going to show how I delt with Heroku & 123-reg.co.uk to set up my DNS properly:

I found this quite fiddly to get working… so here’s what I did:

1). Dealing with DNS

Click on ‘Manage DNS’ and navigate to ‘Advanced DNS’
Add 2 new CNAME:

- www

- DNS Entry: www
- Type: CNAME
- Destination Target: <your URL without the 'www' and with a '.' at the end>

- Everything else

- DNS Entry: *
- Type: CNAME
- Destination Target: <your URL without the 'www' and with a '.' at the end>

2). Getting rid of that pesky ‘www’ subdomain.

Go back to the main list of options
Click on ‘Web Forwarding’
Add a permament (301) redirection:
- Domain Name: <Your URL without the www. I just put ‘wmmclarke.com’>
- Forwarding Type: 301
- Forwarding Destination: <Your URL with http://www prepended to it.>

That should be it!

1). Dealing with DNS

- www

- Everything else

2). Getting rid of that pesky ‘www’ subdomain.

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