Creating and using a CNAME record in DNS

Now that we are familiar with moving around a little bit inside the DNS management tool, we are going to create and test another type of record. This one is called a CNAME (which is short for canonical name), and it is easiest to think of this one as an alias record. Rather than taking a DNS name and pointing it at an IP address as we do with a host record, with a CNAME, we are going to take a DNS name and point it at another DNS name! Why would this be necessary? If you are hosting multiple services on a single server but want those services to be contacted by using different names, CNAME records can be your best friend. Some corporate naming schemes are also very unfriendly to being used by users (imagine getting your users to remember that W19UE1WEB7 is the payroll server), and a CNAME allows us to assign a more memorable name for users to use.

Getting ready

We are going to make use of the same environment that we used to create our...