Since the circular notion of why we need glue records has already been addressed, I won't hit that here... I would agree with "you're probably having trouble with your registrar's user interface". In doing some work for a company that had a number of domains registered at 1and1.com, they (1and1) have a webpage about how to setup glue records, talks about it, but it does not work, and when you call their support, (google has many descriptions of the same issue)... they say that the only way it works is if you host your DNS with them, which kinda defeats the purpose. Whether this is just bad UI, bad support, or they just don't think it's necessary for most of their business ... does not really matter, effectively they are telling the customer who needs that to go somewhere else. In that process (going somewhere else) I've discovered that some registrars make it pretty easy, some ignore it completely. As there are probably fairly few of us than actually need this functionality I think a lot of less expensive registrars, just ignore it. Just throwing this out there in response to OP as something to watch out for because if you need it... Netsol, and Hover make it easy, Godaddy is not intuitive but doable FYI, IMHO. (DISCLAIMER not a complete list just my current limited experience, not meant to denigrate any other registrar that's not mentioned, please no flames). /rh On Thu, Sep 22, 2016 at 9:15 AM, Jimmy Hess <mysidia@gmail.com> wrote:
On Thu, Sep 22, 2016 at 9:37 AM, Doug Barton <dougb@dougbarton.us> wrote:
On 09/21/2016 01:44 PM, Richard Holbo wrote:
FWIW, as I'm in the middle of this right now. It would appear that many of What do you think glue records are, and why do you think you need them? :) (Those are serious questions, btw)
Glue records are also called "Host records", or Alternatively called: "Nameserver" records. These are A and AAAA records for your domain name which appear in the parent TLD zone, instead of the child zone.
Host records also typically appear in WHOIS, for example: "$ whois ns5.yahoo.com"
If you think your registrar does not support them, then you're probably having trouble with your registrar's user interface, and just don't have the right procedure, because the use of host records is quite essential and necessary for at least one domain to self-host DNS......
These records are non-authoritative and belong to the reply delegating nameservers for your domain to your servers, and you need to duplicate a copy of all your NS, A, AAAA records in your child zone, which must be identical to the parent's version of the records.
For example, suppose your domain name is "Example.com" And you want your nameservers to be NS1.example.com, NS2.example.com, NS3.example.com.
Because the nameservers exist in the same domain name which references them, the required DNS lookup graph is circular, and your DNS zone becomes an island!
In order for clients to find your nameserver to figure out what NS1.example.com resolves to, it first needs to be able to find a nameserver for Example.com, which is NS1.example.com.
This is what is circular without a Hint in the Additional section of the DNS reply from the parent nameserver.
The glue record in the parent zone is used to tell the parent TLD server to include the IP address of your nameserver in the Additional Section of the DNS reply, so you can bootstrap DNS resolution for Example.com.
Doug -- -JH