 with the DNS, okay? And what is DNS? Well, that's what we're going to talk about. And DNS has, until not too long ago, has felt like kind of a big scary green monster for me. So it can feel intimidating. So we're only going to skim the surface today and just really talk about the need to know information for a domain of one's own admin. But to put it simply, you can do a ton of reading about DNS, but to put it simply, this is how I like to explain it, okay? So humans are better with names than numbers, right? When I go to reclaimposting.com, I go to my browser, Google Chrome or whatever, and I type in reclaimposting.com. I don't type in the IP address associated with that domain. However, computers are better with numbers. So they associate these websites with IP addresses, and that's their address. That's where they live. Now, I could technically go to this IP address here and type it in my browser. Let's watch it load, hopefully, and you can see that it forwarded to reclaimposting.com and reclaim came up. So there are some instances where this will work, not on shared hosting, because one IP goes to a lot of websites, but in instances where you have one IP for one website, you can really see that translation happening, and so that's a cool example. So this is what kind of makes up DNS. It stands for domain named system, and kind of as it sounds, it's a protocol for naming systems. So there's a lot of reading here that you can go back and read if you're interested in learning how that translation happens, but for now, we're just going to talk about some records that you're going to want to be aware of as administrators. There are dozens of records, but the ones that you'll work with most in C-Panel, this A record here, this is if you walk away with any knowledge on DNS, know this A record. It's like a speed dial for your website. How many of you guys have heard of your domain as your house metaphor? The laugh says enough. The laugh says enough. Okay, so if I, that's fine, but to use that metaphor, because it is helpful with DNS, an A record is a line of directions to get to your house. Okay, so that's or a DNS record, all DNS records are like that. Okay, so your A record, though, is like speed dial. It's like the one that I just put in my browser and it popped up, Reclaim Hosting, and there was an A record doing that. Okay, the next one to be familiar with, and let me see if I can make this bigger, or feel free to follow along. Again, this is on the workshop documentation article. The next one is this Quad A record. It's very similar to the A record, but it's A, A, A record, and that's, we call it a Quad A record, and it's the exact same, but it's for IP version six addresses. The A record is for IP version four addresses. Okay, so they're similar, and it's, no one is either right or wrong, but if you've got both of them, your C panel is going to prefer that Quad A record just because it is a little more specific and works more broadly compared to the A record, but just having that A record is not wrong either. So it's just good to know that that Quad A record exists. A C name record is even better than an A record because sometimes IP addresses change. However, your server name like Haverford.Reclaim Hosting.com, that's not, that name is likely not going to change, but the IP address could. So a C name record, it points to a name, not an IP address. So it says my site is on Haverford.Reclaim Hosting.com instead of Haverford's IP. Okay. Mx record, you may not have to deal with as much, but it's worth noting it stands for Mail Exchange or Mail Exchanger, and it deals with email. A lot of domain ones own projects wipe out email and they, you know, take it away, students don't have access to it. So again, this may not be something that you deal with, but it's worth noting that the Mx record works with your email. NS record, this is name servers, okay. It helps identify other name servers that are working with your account. So Reclaim Hosting's name servers are ns1.ReclaimHosting.com and ns2.ReclaimPosting.com. And then lastly, we have this text record, which again, you may not work with often, but it's good to know because it does store additional information with your website. So an example where a text record might come into place is if the user, let's say a faculty member wants to offload some of their website content to AWS or Dropbox. I know AWS has a text record in association with a couple other records that helps you authorize that offload, that process. So a text record is needed for that. But those are the most common records to be familiar with because you will likely see them in C panels that you're troubleshooting. A couple other things here, some terminology to be aware of. We've talked about this on and off, but DNS propagation, okay. You might hear that term being thrown around. It basically means take effect. So when DNS records change, it takes time for the DNS to propagate, specifically 24 to 48 hours. Okay. So anytime you change a record, even if it's one number of an IP, you're making a change to that A record. And so the site will go offline because it's looking somewhere else. And there is caching that happens on multiple levels. And so it takes time for that to come back into play. There's something called TTL, which stands for time to live. And it's how long that cache on the server lasts. So if you know that you're going to be performing a migration, so bringing someone in from GoDaddy onto domain of one zone, and you know you're going to be making changes to their site, or maybe you want their site to point somewhere else on the server, if you lower this TTL and advance on the server, it's currently the default I think is set to about four hours. It's measured in seconds, like something like 14,000 seconds. But if you drop that down to 30 minutes, you know, the site won't be cached as long. Does that make sense? So you can decrease how long the server recognizes where DNS is pointed. So that's that TTL. And again, if you're super interested in learning how to change that, that's something that we can talk about later, but just want you to be aware of what it is for now. Okay. The next thing I wanted to talk about here are some handy DNS tools. Okay, and this is helpful for lots of reasons. And it all goes back to supporting tickets. When you get a support ticket, you're trying to gather as much information as you can about the user and their domain and their backstory, because chances are they're not going to tell you much. So what's my DNS? Is a really helpful tool for that? I'm going to pull up the link here and see if it loads. Well, maybe we'll come back to it. But essentially, okay, we'll come back to it because my computer's not loading. But essentially, you can put in your URL, like LAbrumfield.com. And let's say I can say, is it pointed to the proper name servers? I can click on NS. So I want to look for that NS record, right? And then click search. And you can see in Seattle, Washington, it's looking at NS1 and NS2.Reclaimhosting.com. Same for New York. Same for Brazil. Okay, so if changes were just made to the NS record, so let's say you've pointed from GoDaddy to Reclaim. And you come over here and it's checked in some places, but it's maybe looking at GoDaddy in other places. That's where you're in the middle of that 24 to 48 hours where it's still changing over, okay? So I want to see if the site's loaded. Still not. But so that's a great resource as well. Same with MX records. So you can see that Reclaim.hosting is using an MX record and we're pointing our mail to Google. We use Google Suite. Anybody can look that up and see that because we have MX records pointed to all of Google.com services, okay? And this little drop down up here, you may be able to load the site. I'm not sure where my computer's not loading it. You can also do the same thing for A records, too, and you can check where the site is loading, what IP address, okay? So that's a super helpful resource. I go there multiple times a day just to get a sense of is the site's not loading. Well, is it even looking at our servers? Just being able to cross out possible solutions is super helpful. Another place to check where the domain is looking is going back into terminal. So I'm bringing this up again and let's start a fresh window here. Terminal, we brought this up in our last session. I wonder if I can, here we go. So I don't have to log into any servers for this. I can just simply type dig, so dig space and then a domain, labrumfield.com and click enter. And there's a little bit of data here that's not too important. It is helpful for certain things, but what we want to look at is we've got this A record here. It's pointed to 104.243.45.66. So that's what is described here. But then the cool part about this is that I can actually then copy this IP address and do I think it's dig-x and then copy that IP there. And that gives me where that IP address is, which is dynojunior.reclaimhosting.com. Because again, I'm not going to memorize IP addresses, but I do know that my school's server name, you know, is brandmar.reclaimhosting.com or whatever. So if I take that IP address, I can then say, hmm, well, it's the site pointed at our servers. And that's a way to do that in terminal. So that's another option. Also, if you've got a Mac computer, there's a built-in feature called network utility on your computer. And I just learned about this not too long ago, but network utility does the exact same thing as terminal. There's a couple other options as well, but I can go into lookup. There's this lookup tab here and search my domain. And the same thing will happen. It pulls up that IP address. I can then copy that IP address, put it right back in, and it's pointed to dynojunior.reclaimhosting.com. Another place here is I could go over to who is and search my domain there. And it's going to process this for a minute. Again, I think my computer is having issues because normally this goes quicker. There we go. But it pulls up all the registrant contact information for a domain. So in this case, it's not super helpful because I have domain privacy on my domain. But you can see right away, you know, you've got a couple helpful pieces of information when the domain was registered, when it was last updated, what the registrar is, and where the name servers are. So if the domain does not have domain privacy, you'd be able to see a little more information about the person who owns the domain. Another place for this would be whois.com. It does the exact same thing as who is on network utility. And I'm in here all the time, one to check if domains are available. So you can come in here and do a random domain.com and it'll say it's available. Or you can come in and search an actual domain and get more information about that registrant contact information there as well. So it's that same information. It's just a little prettier and easier to access. And again, who is is something that I use all the time, just as a place to gather information. The last resource I want to show you guys is called intodns.com. And this site unfortunately only works for top level domains, but it is helpful to diagnose problems. And it basically gives your domains a DNS bill of health. Okay. So we can come to la brumfield.com here. Click report. And it gives you an overview of everything going on on the server or on the domain. So you can see here there's an error because or maybe not an error, but just a notification. There's no SOA record. Well, yes, I don't have an SOA record on my domain. But everything else checks out. There's multiple name servers and those work. So, you know, if in the event that something was not working properly or it was missing an A record altogether, that would show up here with a red X. Okay. Any questions about this so far? I know I'm throwing a lot at you, but it's just helpful tools. And they all do a lot of the same things. So it's just kind of preference for which ones you want to use. I tend to use network utility and who is quite often, but that dig command is also really helpful just for quickly looking up where the domain is pointed because that is a helpful thing to know how to do. Lastly, I want to show you how to actually where you would go to actually edit domain or DNS records. You can do it as the user in their C panel, or you can go in WHM and do it as an admin. The C panel user or the C panel user interface is much easier to work with. So nine times out of 10, that's where we work. Oh, all right. Well, then we will get to it on. Okay. Is that something you'd want me to turn on right now? It's the feature list. I'll just go into Dino Jr. So I've been working with my computer for a load. I've been working with LN field this afternoon. So that's what we will continue to use if it will pop up here. Nice and big. And while that's authenticating, I'll pull up my own C panel. So if you ever did want to edit DNS records in WHM, you would come over to the search bar here and search DNS and then click edit DNS zone. And then you could then search through the list of domains. Really? Yeah. So zoning out, there we go. I think. DNS clustering. So that's where we're doing it for the individual user in their C panel. We'll only see their records and it's a lot faster and easier than having to listen to them. Right. So I just told you. Right. I just told you. So anyway, if I were to go inside labromfield.com and WHM, I could go in and edit those names or edit those DNS records here. So if I wanted to start using Google suite with my mail on my specific domain, I could make those changes here. But you see, I've got a couple of text records, a lot of different A records for things, but that's where you would do it in WHM. Again, I recommend C panel. It's just easier. So if I come up and search DNS here, there's a couple things that come up under the domain section. It's worth noting here that C panel is actually at some point getting rid of the simple zone editor and the advanced zone editor. So moving forward, try and get familiar with just the zone editor. It does all the same things, but at some point, I don't know when they're rolling it out, but zone editor is the only one that's going to be around. So you can see I've got a couple domains here in my account, but I can add an A record or C name or anything right here off the bat. But if I come over to manage next to my domain, those A records are there as well. And again, if we look on use the dig command and find that the domain isn't pointing where we want, it's looking towards another IP address. We could then come in and change that A record here. I'm not going to do that because my site would be offline for at least a day. So, but that's where you would make those changes. Does that make sense? Any questions? So that's DNS in a nutshell. There's a lot we haven't covered, but in terms of managing user issues, just knowing where to make these changes and feeling comfortable with knowing what an A record is and why you would need it, that's helpful. We good? Cool. All right. Well, here's