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 dig command (sudo pacman -S bind on arch)