Bought a Domain from Gandi -- Need Help With Their Interface

August 25, 2004 11:07 AM

Gandi, Typepad and custom dns/domain mapping, oh my. (More inside.)

I bought a domain off of Gandi and am now trying to direct it towards a Typepad blog, only since Gandi is help documentation deficient I am having a devil of a time getting it done. Their custom page says:

A simplified interface which enables you to specify the adress of the site www.domain.tld as gived by your web hosting provider, and the name of the server in charge of receiving the emails for your domain ([e-mail]).A complex interface reserved to advanced users, any question concerning its use won't be answered by our technical support, the subject being too vast. This one enables you to specify an unlimited number of hosts ('A'), aliases ('CNAMES'), and mailservers ('MX'). For that case, you can find a tutorial here to avoid common mistakes: http://www.rscott.org/dns/

Which doesn't really help me very much. I did the simplified interface thing, which asks for A and MX, which I supplied, but doesn't ask for CNAME. So I went into complex interface, which then had (stuff replaced with xs for privacy reasons):

www 3600 IN A 217.xx.xx.xx
@ 3600 IN MX 0 xxxxxxxx.xxx

And added:

cname 3600 IN CNAME xxxxxxx.blogs.com

The change went through but again, as Gandi is not big on the error messages, I'm not sure if I screwed things up majestically. The domain's still not showing up for me or anyone else, so I can't really tell if it's me or just the DNS not propagating yet. Can anyone spot something I might've done wrong?

posted by lia to computers & internet (3 comments total)

And no, before you ask, Typepad doesn't have a walkthrough or documentation for dealing with Gandi.
posted by lia at 11:16 AM on August 25, 2004

lia, I used to have a bunch of domain names at Gandi, and their DNS propogation has always been painstakingly slow. I would suggest you wait 24 hours and ask a few friends around the planet to ping the domain name, check the whois and actually visit the site.

As for the setup, I really don't know because I've never messed with the records personally, I just point mine to a nameserver from my host.
posted by riffola at 12:27 PM on August 25, 2004

Lia, are you just doing a redirect so that typing in www.cakefordinner.com redirects towards cakefordinner.blogs.com or are you doing something more complicated? I've basically had to wait a day or two for Gandi to propogate their DNS as well, but in all my years I've never had to use the complex interface or mess with CNAME records at all to do basic redirects.
posted by jessamyn at 1:00 PM on August 25, 2004