DNS Question

Coffee Lounge
#1

I have taken over a site and the DNS is a bit of a mess right now.

  1. Domain Name is with UK2.net who is also a hosting provider however the site is NOT hosted with them.
  2. Website is hosted on a VPS with a company called 1-grid which is CentOs 7, WHM, cPanel, PHP etc. Lets pretend the IP Address of the VPS is 50.50.50.50 for example.

So seems alright so far, but I need to switch email to Google for Business, which is normally pretty simple, but here is where things get a little strange.

The DNS Editor on UK2.net is not just pointing the A Record at 1-grids VPS to 50.50.50.50, in fact the A record on UK2.net is lets say 100.100.100.100 which is no server I know of at all in this process.
However the 2 NS records are pointing to the 2 name server addresses at 1-grid.

So my question is, to add/edit the MX records I need for Google For Business mail must I do that on the Zone Editor in UK2.net or the Zone Editor at 1-grid. I assume if the NS records are pointed at 1-grid then all the DNS is handed off to 1-grid so the alteration should only happen at 1-grid and nothing changes at UK2.net

I have no idea why if they wanted all DNS handed off to the VPS they did not just do a Domain Name transfer, or if they only wanted the VPS to do the website portion they did not just hand off the A record.
I have no idea which server, both with full zone editor records I should be touching now.

Please help, anyone?

#2

Well if the NS records are all pointing to 1-grid then that’s where you’ll most likely need to edit your MX records.

It sounds as if originally the domain at UK2 was pointing to another server and someone came along and decided to update the name servers without deleting the old A record.

If it were me I would create a dummy cname or A record on both UK2 and 1-grid that are different to each other and then check something like MX-toolbox to see which one of them has updated. That’ll then give you your answer.

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#3

Good idea, I suppose a dummy A record would not impact the current routes etc.

I think whoever did this was a little confused, thanks for the idea Max, appreciate it.

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#4

Happy Wanniversary Max

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#5

Have you tried a trace route to see what the server journey is?

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#6

This is a useful site: https://www.domaindiagnosis.com. Apart from showing DNS records and other info, it has tools such a whois, port checker and traceroute.

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#7

Thanks everyone, well so far it looks like 1-grid records are what are being used, I think, I added a different cname records to both servers and neither have propagated yet, so I will have a final answer when they do, every tool I have run says 1-grid is the one to worry about.

At some point I am going to have to change the enom record directly to 1-grid as i can not see any point in this current setup, why go
root > tld > UK2.net > 1-grid
Its not for failover or speed by the looks of things, so it’s odd.

I will be happy in my head when these cnames finally show up

Nice find Tom, gives loads of information, thanks.