I set up a Linode to migrate a blog BLOG.COMMERCIALSOURCE.COM from where it is now at GoDaddy.

The DNS manager at GoDaddy is available to me and I can make the change in the A record in that zone no problem.

But I don't want to for two reasons.

1) The subdomain and domain is the property of my client who have the SOA for COMMERCIALSOURCE.COM and they should, out of diligence, retain as much control over the domain as they can.

2) Nobody wants any relationship to GoDaddy going forward.

I had assumed that the admin of the nameserver contaning the SOA for the domain (someone in IT at my client's office) would/should perform this change at their own server. But that's not exactly the message I'm getting from the IT person.

What is the right thing to ask for in this case with these goals?

From what I can tell the only relation to Godaddy is the actual web hosting. The domain is not registered through them and the nameservers for commercialsource.com are narns1.realtors.org and narns3.realtors.org, which from what I can tell has no relation to Godaddy.

In other words, it seems to me like you can't do it through Godaddy as they do not appear to be involved wrt the DNS aspect but that you should be able to just have whoever manages the domain change the A record to point to the new web server when you are ready to switch.

You know, that is exactly what I thought - and so I was taken by surprise when I made that request to the admin contact for narns1 and heard them tell me they "didn't have access to update BLOG.COMMERCIALSOURCE.COM". I was *going* to respond right away something like "But WHOIS says:

commercialsource.com. 3600 IN SOA narns1.realtors.org. admin.realtors.org. 26 3600 600 86400 3600


Since you do administer narns1, how can you not have that ability?".

...but instead of responding right away I thought I should step back and sanity check my ideas here.

Any other input from anybody greatly appreciated. And thanks, Hawk7000.

rtucker@witte:~$ dig +trace blog.commercialsource.com
# ...
commercialsource.com.   172800   IN   NS   narns1.realtors.org.
commercialsource.com.   172800   IN   NS   narns3.realtors.org.
;; Received 97 bytes from 192.55.83.30#53(m.gtld-servers.net) in 133 ms

blog.commercialsource.com. 3600   IN   A   173.201.233.1
commercialsource.com.   3600   IN   NS   narns1.realtors.org.
commercialsource.com.   3600   IN   NS   narns3.realtors.org.
;; Received 145 bytes from 63.156.247.69#53(narns1.realtors.org) in 74 ms

Some number of individuals have access to update the records served by narns1.realtors.org and narns3.realtors.org, whether they know it or not. This number may be zero, in which case this is a Serious Problem and the domain should be moved away from those nameservers ASAP. If they do exist, finding such individuals, and convincing them of their powers, can be difficult. (Wachowski 1999)

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Where is the actual domain registered?

Go there and change the nameservers that domain points to (bypassing the need to find out who has access to narns1/3)

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Either provide enough details for people to help, or sit back and listen to the crickets chirp.
Security thru obscurity is a myth - and really really annoying.

It's Netsol, but that kind of gets in the way of one of the goals, which is to have the client obtain or retain control of the domain.

A question: how should I respond to this from the IT people? It seems like it doesn't make sense.



Could this be true? Is there a way that they could have access to the domain but not the subdomain?

Thanks.

BLOG.COMMERCIALSOURCE.COM is not delegated further, it's just an A record in the COMMERCIALSOURCE.COM zone at narns1.realtors.org / narns3.realtors.org.

I don't understand what they mean, I would guess they are just confused.