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Sumukha

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DNS splitting: How to do it exactly?

Hi,

I need to have a webserver hosted at a completely different server hosting company than the email server.

How can I exactly do this (step by step)?

Thanks

Su
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redseatechnologies
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Hi Sumukha,

That is pretty straight forward.

You need an A record for each server.

one for "www" that points at the hosting company
one for "mail" that points at the mail server

Then you need an MX record, pointing to mail.domain.com

Finally, you will need a PTR record for your mail server

Are you trying to configure this yourself?  If so, with what DNS server?

Hope that helps,

-red
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Sumukha

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Hi red,

That was fast...

I will probably have to do it myself, logging into the contol panel of the registrar which seems to be easydns.com.

The email is currently on one server, I need to set up the web server somewhere else. without any interruption for the mailserver.
 
I hope there will be no time out for the email server when the DNS is changed?
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beware your email will be down for a bit while DNS replicates... so make sure you access the old email server after 48 hours or so to see if there are any  emails missed and delivered to the old mailbox.
Expanding on what periwinkle said. If your MX is set to www.mydomain.com, add the new A record for mail.mydomain.com and create an additional MX record for it. Set that new MX record to a higher priority (i.e. lower numbered preference).

Basically the MX portion of your DNS will be something like this:

mydomain.com.             IN       MX       10          www.mydomain.com.
mydomain.com.             IN       MX        5           mail.mydomain.com.

This will ensure that mail will continue to be delivered no matter what. After 72 hours, you can remove the MX record for www.mydomain.com. At that point, you can make the change to the A record for www.mydomain.com at any time. Do note that there will be a period of 24-72 hours where some people will not be able to view the website due to DNS caching and propagation.