DNS Functions

This area of WHM provides access to some basic functions relating to your server’s Domain Name System (DNS) data.

Helpful links: If you are using named (BIND) as your nameserver software, you can learn more about it at BIND's website. If you are using NSD (Name Server Daemon), you can learn more about it at NSD's website.

• Add a DNS Zone — This feature allows you to set up a DNS zone on your server. A DNS zone is an administrative space or portion of the domain name system. This space is responsible for directing traffic to the correct locations.

• Add an A Entry for Your Hostname — An “A entry,” also known as an A record or an address record, consists of data that resides in your server’s DNS zone files. The A entry matches a hostname or domain name with an IP address. Having a correct A entry is essential for allowing other computers to find your server on the Internet.

• Delete a DNS Zone — This tool allows you to delete DNS zones from your server. You may delete multiple zones at once, or delete a single zone.

• Edit DNS Zone — This feature allows you to edit the records in a domain’s DNS zone file.

• Edit MX Entry — This WHM feature lets you list destination mail servers, designating a priority value to each, 0 being the highest priority.

• Edit Zone Templates — If you have a custom DNS setup, you may wish to edit the templates that WHM and cPanel use to create DNS zone files for new domains.

• Establish a Trust Relationship with a Primary Nameserver — This area of WHM is deprecated; to configure a DNS cluster, use the Configure Cluster feature.

• Park a Domain — A parked domain is a secondary domain that points to the user’s primary domain. When users attempt to access the parked domain, they will see the main website. For example, both http://www.cpanel.net and http://www.cpanel.com go to the same place, as cpanel.com is a parked domain for cpanel.net.

• Perform a DNS Cleanup — This function is useful if your BIND configuration file has become corrupted, or if you have duplicate nameserver configuration files which are causing DNS problems for your server.

• Setup/Edit Domain Forwarding — This feature allows you to redirect one domain to another domain. This is useful, for example, for temporarily redirecting visitors while a site is down for maintenance.

• Synchronize DNS Records — This feature is useful if you are using a DNS cluster setup, but find that some servers in the cluster are giving outdated responses to DNS queries. This feature can compare zone files among servers, recognize which are the most up-to-date, and update the servers in the cluster.

• The swapip Utility — This utility allows you to update an IP address in a zone record via the command line using 4 parameters.