How to manage public DNS in Control

Updated by Chris Little on Nov 25, 2015
Article Code: kb/584

Overview

Lumen Cloud supports the ability to host and manage Public DNS zones within the Control Portal. Customers can configure services to manage their entire domain or an individual subdomain DNS zone.

Audience

  • Lumen Cloud Customers who wish to manage public DNS services in the Control Portal

Prerequisites

Configuring a Domain

The steps below will guide a user through configuring a domain within the Control Portal and making the necessary changes with the domain registrar allowing complete management of the DNS records and zone within the platform. Refer to the Configuring a Subdomain portion of this article for steps on leveraging subdomains.

  1. In the Control Portal navigate to DNS, select new dns zone and input the required information.

    • Zone: The name of your zone, in this case we want to manage an entire domain
    • TTL: The zones Time to Live, this is set at the zone level and cannot be changed after creation.
    • Email: The email for the administrative contact for this Zone
    • Configure Google Apps: If you plan to leverage Google apps configure this service setting

    create dns zone

  2. Once your DNS Zone is created, select it and capture the Name Server Records information for use with your domain registrar. The name servers are:

    dns zone list

    dns zone details

  3. Login to your domain registrar portal and update your name server information for your domain to the list provided in the previous step. Each domain registrar will have its own self-service UI to complete this action and we've shown the Godaddy.com approach below. Depending on your domain registrar it can take up to 24 hours for these changes to take effect.

    edit custom name servers

    input name servers

    name servers updated

  4. Navigate to DNS in the Control Portal, select your DNS zone and choose add record. Create your DNS records as required for your services. To validate our configuration we simply created a sample A Record mapping www to a public IP bound to a virtual web server.

    add A Record to dns

  5. Validate the DNS record has propagated (this may take up to 24 hours) using a simple nslookup on your computer.

    nslookup www.csa-team.com
    Server:  resolver1.opendns.com
    Address:  208.67.222.222
    
    Non-authoritative answer:
    Name:    www.csa-team.com
    Address:  206.152.34.145
    
  6. Browse to the virtual web server URL to validate the service is delivered as you desired.

    test website

Configuring a Subdomain

The steps below will guide a user through configuring a subdomain within the Control Portal and making the necessary changes with the domain registrar allowing complete management of the DNS records and zone within the platform. In leveraging a subdomain customers can gain self-service for DNS record management without having administrative control of the entire domain.

  1. In the Control Portal navigate to DNS, select new dns zone and input the required information.

    • Zone: The name of your zone, in this case we want to manage just a subdomain
    • TTL: The zones Time to Live, this is set at the zone level and cannot be changed after creation.
    • Email: The email for the administrative contact for this Zone
    • Configure Google Apps: If you plan to leverage Google apps configure this service setting

    create dns zone for subdomain

  2. Once your DNS Zone is created, select it and capture the Name Server Records information for use with your domain registrar. The name servers are:

    dns zone subdomain list

    dns zone subdomain details

  3. Request that the administrator of your domain (or perform this action directly if you are the domain administrator) add zone records for your subdomain using the list in the previous step. The record details will be as follows:

    • Record Type: nameserver

    • Host: the subdomain name. in this example we used app which will result in app.csa-team.com

    • Points To: the name servers supplied in the previous step

    • TTL: Time to live for this record

      You should perform this action for each of the 4 name servers Control provides.

      Each domain registrar will have its own self-service UI to complete this action and we've shown the Godaddy.com approach below. Depending on your domain registrar it can take up to 24 hours for these changes to take effect.

      add subdomain name servers

      name server additions complete for subdomain

  4. Navigate to DNS in the Control Portal, select your DNS zone and choose add record. Create your DNS records as required for your services. To validate our configuration we simply created a sample A Record mapping a virtual server name to a public IP on this new subdomain.

    add A Record to dns for subdomain

  5. Validate the DNS record has propagated (this may take up to 24 hours) using a simple nslookup on your computer.

    nslookup ca3ccvawebnlb01.app.csa-team.com
    Server:  resolver1.opendns.com
    Address:  208.67.222.222
    
    Non-authoritative answer:
    Name:    ca3ccvawebnlb01.app.csa-team.com
    Address:  206.152.34.145
    
  6. Browse to the public DNS name to validate the service is delivered as you desired.

    test website for subdomain