Gathering all records before changing DNS hosts

dns-hostingdomain-name-system

My organization owns a domain name through Network Solutions. Network Solutions does not host the DNS for us (another company hosts the DNS through RackSpace).

I would like to take ownership of the DNS hosting by using Network Solution's DNS manager but first I need to make sure I have all the records that currently exist on the RackSpace DNS.

Is there a way to definitively gather everything in the RackSpace DNS without having access to the rackspace account so I can safely change the DNS to Network Solution nameservers?

Best Answer

No. The way to gather everything is called a zone transfer request (an AXFR query) - in all but a few rare cases, authoritative DNS servers on the internet will deny these requests.

Getting the contents of the zone through the management interface (or an export of the zone file - not sure what Rackspace offers in this respect) is the only way to be certain to faithfully recreate the zone.

Answer

The short answer to your specific question of listing CNAMEs is that you cannot without permission to do zone transfers (see How to list all CNAME records for a given domain?).

That said, if your company's DNS server still supports the ANY query, you can use dig to list the other records by doing:

dig +noall +answer +multiline yourdomain.yourtld any

These ... +noall +answer +multiline ... are strictly optional and are simply output formatting flags to make the output more easily human readable (see dig man page ).

Example

$ dig +noall +answer +multiline bad.horse any

Returns:

bad.horse.              7200 IN A 162.252.205.157
bad.horse.              7200 IN CAA 0 issue "letsencrypt.org"
bad.horse.              7200 IN CAA 0 iodef "mailto:abuse@sandwich.net"
bad.horse.              7200 IN MX 10 mx.sandwich.net.
bad.horse.              7200 IN NS a.sn1.us.
bad.horse.              7200 IN NS b.sn1.us.
bad.horse.              7200 IN SOA a.sn1.us. n.sn1.us. (
                                2017032202 ; serial
                                1200       ; refresh (20 minutes)
                                180        ; retry (3 minutes)
                                1209600    ; expire (2 weeks)
                                60         ; minimum (1 minute)
                                )

Caveats (RFC8482)

Note that, since around 2019, most public DNS servers have stopped answering most DNS ANY queries usefully. For background on that, see: https://blog.cloudflare.com/rfc8482-saying-goodbye-to-any/

If ANY queries do not enumerate multiple records, the only option is to request each record type (e.g. A, CNAME, or MX) individually.

Changing Domain Name DNS to Redirect web traffic to one server, and leave mail to original server

Change the A RR of your domain (let's say example.com) and of www.example.com to the IP address of the Rackspace server. Leave mail.example.com as it is and create an MX RR for example.com pointing to mail.example.com.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

List all DNS records in a domain using dig

Answer

Example

Caveats (RFC8482)

Changing Domain Name DNS to Redirect web traffic to one server, and leave mail to original server

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