A question we get asked quite a lot by customers is about reverse DNS for their servers. Basically reverse DNS is what converts an IP back into a hostname.
The main reason you’d need to amend your reverse DNS is that it is used a lot these days in anti-spam filtering on mail servers. Basically if you don’t have reverse DNS set for your IP addresses, you will find that email goes missing to certain providers (most noticeably AOL).
The solution is to get your hosting provider to set reverse DNS for the IP address(es) that your server sits on. This should match the forward DNS for your site, i.e. the reverse DNS entry should then resolve back to the same IP.
i.e. our main mail server at mail.melbourne.co.uk’s forward dns points to 87.237.57.7. Doing a reverse DNS lookup on 87.237.57.7 points back to mail.melbourne.co.uk. This means other mail servers don’t get confused and reject your email.
Customers of Melbourne simply need to go to our support centre to edit rDNS.
If you need to do DNS lookups, try DNS Stuff, which is great for doing deeper DNS lookups and traceroutes.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 16th, 2007 at 7:39 pm and is filed under Helping Hints from our Techies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
