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mabdrasol
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Dec 30, 2019

Exchange TXT MX SPF Records

Hello,

we are migrating all of our records from ISP to GTM and all A records have been migrated successfully by delegating from ISP to our GTM

but I cant create MX or TXT records at GTM to migrate it to GTM

I have read some documents to add MX records through DNS>Zones>ZoneRunner>Zone List.

but I coulnt find any zones here and I dont know the impact of adding new zone here

 

any help please

5 Replies

  • At face value, certainly you should not have a problem creating MX and TXT records under ZoneRunner -- they are fully supported.

     

    Your statement "...all A records have been migrated successfully by delegating from ISP to our GTM..." is a little confusing to me ... Normally, it is a subdomain that gets delegated to other DNS nameservers (such as F5 GTMs), not individual DNS resource records (e.g., A records) per se -- unless, of course, the sole purpose of the delegation is to achieve intelligent high availability load balancing via a wide-IP (under so-called "Delegation Mode", which usually involves CNAME records for the specific resource records involved) without actually delegating the entire subdomain to those nameservers.

     

    Since an ISP is involved, I assume that this is all in public DNS, and thus anyone is free to look at how your ISP is delegating to your GTM. Can you share the name of one of the A records that is successfully resolving in DNS, so that we can see (e.g., via nslookup, dig, etc) how the technical linkage is implemented between the ISP and your GTM?

  • Hello,

    what I am did

    -Create A record for GTM at ISP

    -Create NS record at ISP for delegation for every A record.

    and above steps worked fine.

    now I am trying to add MX and TXT records but with no luck as I cant find any zones. but from tmsh I can find it

    any help please

  • I think I am starting to understand what you are saying, but I'm not completely sure. See if this is close to what your situation is ...

     

    For example purposes, say that your ISP has the ISP.COM domain allocated to it in DNS, and has created the subdomain MABDRASOL.ISP.COM for your use in which you can define your own DNS resource records. Obviously, the DNS records that you create must be either literally named mabdrasol.isp.com or have a prefix such as abc.mabdrasol.isp.com, def.ghi.mabdrasol.isp.com, etc.

     

    So, continuing with the example, say within your MABDRASOL.ISP.COM subdomain you originally had 3 A records with DNS hostnames defined to resolve to IP addresses as follows:

     

    www.mabdrasol.isp.com A 1.2.3.4

    ftp.mabdrasol.isp.com A 5.6.7.8

    smtp.mabdrasol.isp.com A 9.10.11.12

     

    Then, later you decided to migrate those A records so that they could resolve on your GTM instead of your ISP. So, the approach that you took was to first define them on your GTM with each being a separate zone in ZoneRunner:

     

    www.mabdrasol.isp.com - defined as a zone, with an A record of 1.2.3.4

    ftp.mabdrasol.isp.com - defined as a zone, with an A record of 5.6.7.8

    smtp.mabdrasol.isp.com - defined as a zone, with an A record of 9.10.11.12

     

    Then, at the ISP in your MABDRASOL.ISP.COM zone, you replaced the A records with NS records to achieve delegations as follows:

     

    www.mabdrasol.isp.com NS gtm.mabdrasol.net

    ftp.mabdrasol.isp.com NS gtm.mabdrasol.net

    smtp.mabdrasol.isp.com NS gtm.mabdrasol.net

     

    where, again for example purposes, gtm.mabdrasol.net is the DNS hostname of your GTM. 

     

    Everything now works fine with that arrangement. When you want to make a change in how the three records resolve (e.g., perhaps have abc.mabdrasol.isp.com resolve to 4.3.2.1 instead of 1.2.3.4) you can just make the change directly on your GTM without having to utilize your ISP.

     

    But ... now say that you also have an MX record at the ISP:

     

    mabdrasol.isp.com MX 10 smtp.mabdrasol.isp.com

     

    and now you find that attempting to use same approach that you did with the above A records fails.

     

    The reason it fails is because to implement the needed NS delegation record:

     

    mabdrasol.isp.com NS gtm.mabdrasol.net

     

    you would have to create this record in the upper-level ISP.COM zone itself, which is under the exclusive control of your ISP. You cannot create any DNS records there.

     

    In short, this is because mabdrasol.isp.com itself is a DNS domain name, whereas www.mabdrasol.isp.com, ftp.mabdrasol.isp.com, are DNS host names.

     

    I hope that this addresses your situation ... and that it helps.

  • Hello,

    thank u so much for your explanation, please let

    -I have full access at ISP DNS records creation and modification

    -no zones created at ISP nor GTM itsself

    -what I did :

    1-delete A records from ISP side

    2-create NS record at ISP side

    2-create same A records at GTM

    no I plan to migrate MX and TXT resource records from ISP to GTM but when I use same steps to create VS>POOL>WideIP I cant configure the data itself at MX records

    then I found a document to create it using zone runner but by using DNS  ››  Zones : ZoneRunner : Resource Record List then create and choose type MX

    but unfortunately I couldn't complete the steps as MX should return data like xxxxxx.mail.protection.outlook.com.

     

  • Thank you for the clarification ...

     

    From your description, it seems like that (although, again, I can't be completely sure) I mostly understood what you were doing with the DNS resource records ... the only thing that I didn't understand was that for every A record that you migrated, you were using a wide-IP to represent it on your GTM; not RoadRunner. (Which, of course, would allow you to take full advantage of the intelligent DNS high availability load balancing with health check / service check / content check monitors that F5 offers over the local BIND instance utilized by RoadRunner.)

     

    However, for the MX records and TXT records -- unless they are being utilized for the hostnames under the subdomain that your ISP has granted you (MABDROSOL.ISP.COM in the example that I contrived) -- still have the same problem as in my example: a domain (or subdomain) cannot delegate its own name to other DNS nameservers. (Additionally, note that TXT records cannot be represented by a wide-IP.)

     

    SUGGESTION: Assuming you are doing your DNS work on the public Internet, could you share one of the successful A record migrations; and one of the MX records that you are unable to successfully migrate? This would clearly allow better understanding by all of what the issues are, and facilitate recommendations on how to correct.