Domain management
Most established companies have already registered a domain name. This will usually have been registered by either a director of the company or by a web developer. The reason the web developer often registers the domain is that he or she will need to add an entry to point to the web site.
What is a domain? Atomik.biz. is a domain and is different from www.atomik.biz. which is a web address or Universal Resource Locator (URL). Different again is auser@atomik.biz. which is an email address.
To have any of these, a domain needs to be registered with a registrar. Domain name services (DNS) are needed for the domain to be useful and are what converts the words we type in to our browser like www.atomik.biz into the network addresses which computers need to communicate.
DNS has several other records that are vital to the efficient use of the internet. These are beyond the scope of this article but are used for the efficient management of the company's web presence.
What can go wrong?
The domain has been registered and the details of how to control it have been lost. The most common scenario is the domain was registered with a sales focused company over the internet, often from overseas. These are cheap but if the login is lost it is a major problem to regain control of the domain.
The registrar is taken over or goes out of business. Although not a common problem we have had a problem where one registrar was bought by a larger one who took over billing for the domains. They did not update the domain management and were very unhelpful so the domain became unmanageable. If a domain is a .co.uk then this would not be too serious but in this case it was a .com which makes it more difficult to resolve.
If not correctly configured, either services won't work at all or other less easily diagnosed problems occur. A good example of this is the problem of SPAM. Over the last few years technologies have been developed to reduce SPAM. One of these is the SPF record which is an entry in DNS. This publishes to the Internet the addresses of machines authorised to send email for a domain. Many domains do not have an SPF record which leaves them open to SPAMMERS sending email claiming to be from their domain.
There are other times when being able to make quick changes to DNS are important. An example of this is where a third party is selling an Internet service like an SSL certificate and request a DNS change to prove you have control of the domain.
Who should manage DNS?
In our view the systems engineer should manage a company's DNS and not the web developer. The reason for this is that the web developer is only interested in the web site whereas the systems engineer is responsible for managing all aspects of the network infrastructure. During ongoing maintenance of a network, DNS settings need to be changed for numerous reasons and this needs to be possible without the delays of liaising with a third party. Also the systems engineer is likely to have a better understanding of all the involved technologies. Infrastructure changes that require DNS changes are typically done out of business hours so the systems engineer ideally wants to be able to manage the changes themselves in real time.