DNS Setup
The DNS provides the mechanism by which a name like www.reach-village.co.uk is converted into an IP address like 217.154.114.244 for use by the network. It also provides reverse lookup, i.e. converting an IP address into a name.
The RASP Community Network provides its own DNS servers and you are encouraged to use as your first choice the one at IP address 217.154.114.253 which is also known by the names: ns1.raspnet.co.uk, dns.reach-village.co.uk, dns.swaffham-prior.co.uk, and dns.upware-village.co.uk . If you want to configure a second server, please use one of 217.154.114.240 (ns2.raspnet.co.uk) or 217.154.114.250 (ns0.raspnet.co.uk).
You should configure all other services by name, e.g. mail.reach-village.co.uk rather than the corresponding IP address (currently 217.154.114.244 but previously 217.154.114.253) because whilst we guarantee that names like mail.reach-village.co.uk will remain the same, the IP address to which they refer may not as we expand and develop the network. The only occasion on which you should need to use an IP address rather than a name on our network is when specifying the DNS server (chicken and egg ...)
Your own machine has an entry in the DNS. We normally set this up so that it is simply {your_surname}.{whichever_village}.co.uk but you can email hostmaster at {whichever_village}.co.uk to ask for this to be changed to something more suitable for your use, e.g. a business name. If you have your own domain, e.g. {my_business}.co.uk, we can set the reverse lookup (see above) to point to this rather than a village name.
Troubleshooting DNS Problems In Windows
DNS problems can be hard to tie down in Windows because it keeps a local copy of information it has got from the DNS so, if your DNS was wrongly set up, Windows may not bother to check and get the right information after you have corrected the setup. To get around this problem, either use Start - Run to get a command box or start a C prompt window and type the command ipconfig /flushdns to clear any local copies. nslookup is another useful command you can run from the C prompt; this lets you see the result of a DNS query, e.g.
nslookup dns.swaffham-prior.co.uk
produces
dns.swaffham-prior.co.uk canonical name = ns1.raspnet.co.uk.
Name: ns1.raspnet.co.uk
Address: 217.154.114.253
as expected from the notes above.