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I want to change an A record of my root domain www.domain.com to CNAME dyndns.org.

But the cpanel gives me the following error:

already has a SOA record.
You may not mix CNAME records with other records for the same name.

Can you please explain what this means? And how do I fix it?

peterh
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  • are you kidding me? why the down vote? some people just enjoy down-voting without writing a single word? –  Jul 11 '12 at 07:06
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    @MadHatter how can it be duplicate of something asked two years after? :) if you want the other question is duplicate of this. –  May 04 '15 at 10:28
  • The other is a canonical question. Look around SF; once we have a canonical question on a given subject, it is normal to close all other occurrences of that question as duplicates. Note, however, that all closers other than me closed this because it's cpanel-related, and most web-panel-admin questions are (now) also OT here. – MadHatter May 04 '15 at 10:29
  • @MadHatter do as you please, I'm banned from here anyways :) necromancy goes the long way though. –  May 04 '15 at 11:12
  • @MadHatter that doesn't have sense. It a good question. It's a new way to ask probably something more canonical, but I think that a place like this is to resolve life to people not to show how much they know. A question like this maximize alternatives to find a solutions. Probably a better alternative should be an edition de top answer with a link to canonical "question" with a canonical "answers" . This help a lot to know 'what is the must to be known' to solve in any web-panel-admin. It's not bad a cpanel related post, because it could help to solved fast for cpanel-related users. – molavec May 28 '18 at 17:01
  • @molavec do feel free to add to the canonical answers, or propose a new question on meta (don't just create one out of the blue, though, that tends not to go well). But you should also be aware that cpanel questions (like all webpanel not-really-sysadmin questions) have a high bar to exceed on SF. And, of course, a CNAME is absolutely prohibited at the root of a zone, and no amount of flannel about "maximising alternatives to find a solution" will get around that. – MadHatter May 28 '18 at 17:26

1 Answers1

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Just to clarify, www.example.com is not the root of the domain, example.com is.

A CNAME on www.example.com is valid, but a CNAME on example.com is not - cpanel is right to reject the attempt. A CNAME record can only exist on a name when no other record type exists for that name, since it indicates that all lookups (of any type, not just A) for that name should look up against a different name instead. You must always have at a minimum an SOA record and an NS record on your root name (example.com), so a CNAME conflicts with the existence of those records.

Shane Madden
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  • to overcome this problem, can I CNAME www.example.com to dyndns server, and in some way redirect example.com to www.example.com ? –  Jul 10 '12 at 21:38
  • @SandroDzneladze Yes, but that depends on having a mechanism to perform the redirect. Do you have a web server available that can be pointed at through an A record, which can then redirect to the www name? – Shane Madden Jul 10 '12 at 21:41
  • yes I have hostgator account where I'm setting up cname records to point to my homeserver with dynamic IP. What would be google safe way of redirecting example.com to www.example.com? –  Jul 10 '12 at 21:43
  • @SandroDzneladze A 301 redirect is the search friendly way to do that; it informs the search engine that the redirect is "permanent". – Shane Madden Jul 10 '12 at 21:50