In orbit, on the domain admin page, in the Standard Resource Records section, there is A, CNAME, and TXT. I am familiar with the first two, but what is TXT used for?

spf records use it... not sure about anything else.

You can just stick notes in there or other crazy garbage. Fill it up with your address book and phone numbers if you like, then you can have access to them from anywhere in the world with a quick nslookup !

Thanks.

One other question. Does url forwarding work with domain names purchased with theplanet? I am trying to forward our domain to our forums hosted at another site. But it instead of taking of directly to our forums, it takes us to the main page of the site, www.greatboard.com.

Am I doing something wrong? Or does url forwarding not work? I am currently using a CNAME to point it over to greatboard.

Just to clarify, I would ASSume that an entry like this:

www.mydomain.net. IN CNAME forums.greatboard.com.


would mean that if I go to www.mydomain.net, it should take me to forums.greatboard.com. Is that correct?

Well, it would resolve to the same IP address. Whether that actually takes you to the same website would depend on whether that virtual site was configured to answer on both host headers or not. This process differs depending on whether you're using apache or IIS.

If it's just a single website listening on that IP, then yes.

This really isn't related to DNS however, now we're getting into web server configuration.

I think I read once about someone writing a bittorrent hack that stored the tracker files in a TXT record and used DNS to distribute them. Oh the wacky wacky world of DNS!

That's what I was afraid of. www.greatboard.com and forums.greatboard.com (forums = whatever your forum is called) both share the same ip.

I can't do anything about their webserver setup. Can anyone think of anything I can do that would point our domain to the forums? Their recommendation was to use "frame forwarding." Does theplanet support that?

That would have to be done by you. You'd set up hosting for www.yourdomain.com and in the default document (index.html or whatever) you'd put a frameset with one frame that loads forum.greatboard.com, so it looks to the user like they're at www.yourdomain.com, but all of the content comes from forum.greatboard.com. However, this will cause the URL in the address bar to always be www.yourdomain.com and will not change when they click links or whatever. I personally can't stand frame-forwarding.

Understood, thank you!