One of our clients hosts their domain and DNS with Network Solutions (“NetSol”) (their first mistake).
For those who don’t know: NetSol is the oldest, more arcane domain services provider.
Today, we wanted to update some DNS records (A, CNAME). An easy task with other providers such as eNom or GoDaddy.
Here is the story.
For references “@” is the domain name in question, a common
Cannot Delete A Record for www.
Our first step was to remove the A record for the www. entry, which we wanted to replace with a CNAME.
In the DNS manager provided by NetSol we check a box labelled “Delete” and press save.
The record was not deleted, the IP address portion was, but the entry it-self was not.
The result was that a lookup for “www.@” was simply empty. WTF?
We contacted support, and after more than 20 minutes of navigating the IVR and waiting we were connected with a CSR who mumbled and didn’t know a freaking thing about DNS.
We explained to them our issue, which they didn’t understand.
After repeating ‘We want to delete the A record for WWW’ about a dozen time they got it.
The CSR then looked at our account, made some adjustments and asked us to verify.
All the entries were gone! What the FUCK?!
Except, that the ‘A’ record section of their manage won’t allow us to remove the entry for ‘www’, it’s hard coded.
What an epic fail.
So, now we had to re-create all the A records the previously existed.
Good thing we had documentation.
So we tried the whole process again.
Checked the “Delete” box next to www again and selected delete.
Waited for their slow caching system to referesh the data (five minutes) and saw the same results.
The A record persists, with a blank entry, and prevents us from creating a CNAME record for www..
In short, the DNS “Manager” provided by NetSol is a flaming pile of crap.
How to Fix It
Firstly, NetSol, could improve their system so that it actually functions, uses caching properly and allows the user to manage A, CNAME and other records with full authority.
Another option is to choose an alternate DNS provider – such as that provided by eNom or GoDaddy (or dozens of others).
For us, we assisted the customer with migrating their domains out of NetSol.