DNS Records
By Eli Fast on 2026-02-01
Types
A
- A for address
- Most fundamental DNS record
- Maps a domain name to an IPv4 address.
- Can map the “apex” domain (e.g. example.com) to an IP address or any subdomain (e.g. www.example.com, blog.example.com, etc).
AAAA
- A but for IPv6
CNAME
- Maps a domain to another domain
- “Canonical Name”
- canonical name = the domain being pointed TO.
- pointing domain is the “alias domain”
- Try to set up CNAME -> A instead of CNAME -> CNAME -> CNAME -> A so that you don’t have so many DNS lookups. CNAME -> A is already 2.
NS
- “Nameserver”
- Tells the higher up nameservers which nameserver is authoritative for this domain
SOA
- “Start of Authority”
- Stores a bunch of information
- Things like timing for retrying DNS lookups and who is the admin and stuff
TXT
- “Text”
- Just stores some text for either humans or machines to read
- Used for various purposes
Notes
- DNS records are public
- You can see them by using the
digcommand (sudo pacman -S bind on arch)