My Quick Fix

Problem

We’re building a website in Business Catalyst and need to provide the client with a test site during the design, build and testing phases. This test site needs to be accessible on a sub-domain of the client’s main domain. At the same time we want to retain DNS control of the parent domain, and stick a small holding site there.

For example:
‘mydomain.com’ has a small holding site on it, and mail services etc work as usual for that domain.
‘test.mydomain.com’ needs to be delegated to the Business Catalyst nameservers.

Solution

Turns out this is easy (peasy) if you’re using ZoneEdit, but probably equally as simple with any domain registrar service that lets you make changes to a domain’s zone file.

1) Login and ‘View’ the domain you need to work on.

2) Click on the  ‘Nameservers’ links, Shown below:

3) Add the domain and subdomain in full in the ‘Domain Name’ field, and the new nameserver in the next field. The IP isn’t necessary. In the image below, you can see that one nameserver for the subdomain has already been added, and the second one is being entered. There ARE usually at least 2 nameservers for a zone.

That’s it, done. Now when a lookup is done on test.mydomain.com, the query is forwarded to the nameservers ns1 and ns2 at anotherserver.com, and any records they have for the subdomain are returned.

Please leave a comment if you have any questions, thoughts or corrections.