Like major corporations, schools can register and host domain names for website hosting and email access. This allows a school to own and host a unique domain name which is specific to there school name and the county in which they are located. School web site addresses normally follow the format of: http://www.schoolname.county.sch.uk

Customers can purchase a Domain Name Hosting service from RM. However, they must initially register a ".co.uk" or ".sch.uk" domain name with Nominet (http://www.nominet.net/). In the main, for most new sites, the IFL Delivery Team will usually take care of this on behalf of the school. Nominet usually provide one free .sch.uk domain to UK schools, and any subsequent registrations would be subject to normal Nominet registration fees. The school agrees with Nominet which ISP they want to use for hosting the domain name. Providing the school wishes to host the domain with RM, then Nominet will "tag" the domain to "RMPLC". This is a process by which Nominet add a unique tag (IPS Tag) to individual domain names. This is so that Nominet can see exactly who is responsible for the hosting the domain name.

An example zone file is listed below.The bold single numbers in brackets are NOT part of the zonefile, they are merely to reference the descriptions below.

Zone file for school.county.sch.uk

$TTL 86400
@ IN SOA (1) dns0.rmplc.co.uk. dnsmaster.rmplc.co.uk. (
2006033000 ; Serial (2)
28800 ; Refresh after 8 hours (3)
7200 ; Retry after 2 hours (4)
604800 ; Expire after 1 week (5)
86400 ; Minimum TTL 1 day (6)
)

IN NS dns0.rmplc.co.uk. (7)
IN NS dns1.rmplc.co.uk.
IN NS dns2.rmplc.co.uk.

IN MX 10 scanmailext.easymail.va.ifl.net. (8)
IN MX 20 mx.ifl.net.

mail IN CNAME webmail.easymail.va.ifl.net.
post IN CNAME scanmailext.easymail.va.ifl.net.
imail IN CNAME lp.app.easymail.th.ifl.net.

ftp IN CNAME www (9)
www IN A 194.238.189.8 (10)

Key for zone file above:

(1) SOA - Site Of Authority record. This marks the beginning of a zone's data and defines parameters that affect the entire zone.

(2) This is the version number of the zone file. When a zone file is created or modified, the serial number will be updated as part of the process. We use the format yyyymmdd00. In this example the zone file was last updated on 30 March 2006. If the zone file is updated more than once in the same day the last two digits must be incremented by 1. If the serial number is not updated the changes to the zone file will not be picked up by other servers. The actual date is not important, it is actually the higher number which comes into play and allows the most recent zone file to be active. However, the date format will follow this process naturally, and is easier to administer visually.

(3) Refresh - this specifies the length of time, in seconds, that the secondary server should wait before checking with the primary server to see if the zone has been updated.

(4) Retry - this defines how long secondary servers should wait before trying again if the primary server fails to respond to a request for a zone refresh.

(5) Expire - this defines how long the zone's data should be retained by the secondary servers without receiving a zone refresh.

(6) Minimum - this is the value used as the default TTL (time to live) in all resource records where an explicit ttl value is not provided.

(7) NS - identifies a domain's nameserver. The records identify the authoritative servers for a zone.

(8) The MX (mail exchanger) record lists one or more machines that have agreed to receive mail for a particular site. Multiple MX records are tried in order of preference e.g. MX 10 has the greatest preference and MX 100 the lowest. MX records always take precedence over A records. The example above shows settings for RM Easymail Plus. 

(9) A CNAME (alias) refers us to another record withing the zone file called "www" (references to external addresses would be followed with a "." like the Easymail addresses under mail, post and imail).

(10) An A (address) record gives the IP address (in this case, of the web site) directly