DNS two domains one server

Question

Greetings All, Long time reader first time poster. I work for a small school district. We are our own SOA so we can pretty much do what we want.

In the state of Washington all educational institutions are given a name like myschools.wednet.edu. I've recently purchased a new and hopefully easier to remember domain myschools.org and I'd like to use both domains and have them point to the same information and subdomains i.e. helpdesk.myschools.org would equal helpdesk.myschools.wednet.edu. I'd also like this to work with e-mail but I think this is a bit more complicated.

I'm sure this has been done, but I'm not entirely sure I'm asking the question in a way that can be easily answered.

Any and all help is appreciated.

TIA, Dave

Answer 1

To do this, you'll have multiple DNS record entries (A-Recs) pointing to the same IP Address. You may also need to tweak IIS (or your web server software) to accept requests coming from both domains.

So...in your DNS manager (e.g. in Register.com or whereever you manage your domains) change the A-Rec to point myschools.org (your domain) to the same server IP address where myschools.wednet.edu is currently pointed (I take it that you told them where to point the subdomain).

If you are using IIS then setting up multiple domains on one web site is easy. You'll create just one web site (or use the one to which wednet.edu points). Next, right-click the web site in IIS and choose Properties. On the "Web Site" tab, click "Advanced" and in the resulting dialog, use the "Add" button to add your additional domains/subdomains. That's all you'll need to do.

Hope this helps!

Answer 2

If you want lots of subdomain entries to map from one domain to the other then you'll need to either add A or CNAME records in the new domain pointing to the old domain.

In most cases I'd recommend a CNAME, however if you want the unadorned "myschools.org" domain to respond to HTTP requests that would have to be an A record, because you can't put in a CNAME at the top level of a zone.

Alternatively, there's a relatively new DNS record type called DNAME which can map an entire domain to another in one fell swoop. Unfortunately it's not widely supported yet.