Sunday, May 5, 2013

Transfer DNS management to GoDaddy

Some time ago, I transferred my geeky-boy.com domain from an old hosting service to GoDaddy.  At that time, I set the NS servers to my (then) new hosting service, suso.org.  I did this so that it would be transparent for me if suso decided to move my web page or mail server to a different host.  (And indeed, they did move me at one point, and connectivity was seamless and smooth, so it "worked".)

Now I plan to move to a different hosting service, so I wanted to move DNS management from suso to GoDaddy, which has a web-based control panel so that I could self-manage.  It was not clear to me how to transfer management from Suso to GoDaddy, but after some experimentation and reading, I figured it out.

The first thing to do is to get a print out of all the domain zone information.  I had to send a support request to Suso to get it, and it took a full week.  :-(

Log into GoDaddy and go to "My Account".  On the "DOMAINS" row click "Launch".  Select the domain name.

Under "Nameservers" click "Set Nameservers".  It probably says, "I have specific nameservers for my domains" set.  Change it to "I want to park my domains".  This should set your name servers to NSxx.DOMAINCONTROL.COM where "xx" is a 2-digit number.  Click "OK".

You will now have to wait about 5 minutes and then refresh the page.  At that point, you should see the  Nameservers section with the NSxxDOMAINCONTROL.COM , and under "DNS Manager" it should have a bunch of pre-defined A, CNAME, and MX records defined, all pointing at GoDaddy's servers.  These are the "parking" settings, which you don't want.

Under that is the link "launch".  Click it.  That puts you into the zone editor, which is pretty easy to figure out.  I changed the "@" A record to point at Suso (I haven't moved yet), and added the other A records to match what Suso has.  I removed all the GoDaddy CNAME records and added the ones from Suso.  And I changed the MX records.

Now I just have to decide where to host everything.