#3322

Dreamhost has added a nicer DNS management interface, along with some other updates to its panel. It’s available under the “Websites” pane of the “Domains” section. It’s sleeker and more advanced, and offers two record types I’ve been interested in that weren’t available before: CAA records, and MX records for subdomains.

Unfortunately, neither of them worked for me. The subdomain MX never resolved for me and disappeared from the list, by itself, after a day or two. The CAA records actually seemed to break the entire zone: requests for any record type wouldn’t resolve at all. I had to remove the CAA records and wait for the change to propagate to be able to request other record types again. I tried both record types a few times, with the same results each time. I have a support ticket in with Dreamhost about it.

They have also added NAPTR records, but I have never used them before and didn’t try them.

Another cool feature is a “DNS Checker” that checks what a given record resolves to from like 30 points around the world. It gives an ‘X’ or ‘√’ for each based on whether it resolves and shows them in a list and a map format. It doesn’t necessarily verify they are as they should be though, as happened with my subdomain MX problem.

Seems like the main name servers settings has gotten a slight improvement. It still doesn’t allow using Dreamhost’s name servers alongside external name servers, but it at least switches fully to Dreamhost’s if any of the records are theirs. In the “Manage Domains” section, entering nameservers like this results in a weird state where the panel will likely show something different than what was entered, and the actual NS returned from request may just be theirs or may just be the external ones, but may not match what the panel says. So the new version switches it to something that works.

I found this area after reading the linked blog post, though the post doesn’t mention the DNS features specifically, so I can’t be sure they weren’t in there previously. The “Manage Domains” and “Custom MX” panes where I previously had managed my DNS remain unchanged.