Wilhelmina Randtke writes > I'm trying to get a subdomain of my university's domain pointed at content > on a cheapie hosting account. To do this, I can get main campus to put in > a CNAME record with the IP address matching where the DNS for my cheapie > hosting account is currently located in the cheapie hosting company's > system. The problem is, this IP will periodically change, meaning main > campus IT will have to be involved periodically down the line in order to > cut and paste the new IP into their system, and meaning that the hosted > services could go unavailable for a few days when this happens. I am probably something missing here, as my experience is with root servers rather than web hosting. But I do know a bit about DNS. My expernienc suggests that once you have a CNAME, in BIND notation foo IN CNAME bar the name foo is replaced by name bar. There is no IP address involved. If bar changes changes IP address, the IP address of foo also changes. In fact, all record types attached to bar carry over to foo. So you can't say foo IN CNAME bar foo IN NS widget as the NS (nameserver) for foo is the same as the NS for bar, not widget. > Am I doing this the hard way? You have not told us what you do. > *How would you go about getting a subdomain > of your university's URL to point at your cheapie webhosting account? * If your webhoster gives you a URL at http://randtke.webhoster.com your uni DNS can just say randtke IN CNAME randtke.webhoster.com. > Subdomain forwarding with masking then storing content at a random URL but > having it appear to be on the university's subdomain does not work, because > this causes problems responding to XML queries. I don't understand that approach, so I suspect my answer is off the mark but it may still be helpful. Cheers, Thomas Krichel http://openlib.org/home/krichel http://authorprofile.org/pkr1 skype: thomaskrichel