If you happen to have domain names at oneandone.com and having a hosting from a company that provides private name server only, you would go through some pains setting the DNS for the domain.

What is private DNS?

Lets say your domain name is yourdomain.com. If you have name servers like ns1.yourdomain.com, ns2.yourdomain.com etc then they are private name servers; they are very specific to your domain name.

Most hosting company I have worked with gives a generic name server. For example peer1 gives ns1.peer1.net etc. HostGator and some other companies give private DNS, I guess with dedicated servers only.

How do you set the private DNS?

If you try to set the private DNS as the primary, secondary DNS fields you would get an error message saying its not recognized as valid name server or somehting like this.

Some hosting companies gives the option to add private namer servers. Once you do that you can use the name servers as usual.

How you do it with OneandOne.com?

They got a very weird way of dealing with Private DNS. They call it Glue Domain.

Here are the steps:

• Assign two IP address to the ns1.yourdomain.com and ns2.yourdomain.com at your hosting. If you don’t know how to do that, ask technical support.
• Create two subdomains ns1.yourdomain.com and ns2.yourdomain.com at oneandone domain control panel. notice that the subdomains are named as ns1 and ns2.
• Set the ip address of those subdomains as the two ip addresses you used at your hosting company for DNS. At oneandone check subdomain then click edit dns->on Advanced DNS settings check Other Ip Address->enter the ip address
• Set the DNS of yourdomain.com as your subdomains. In this case ns1.yourdomain.com and ns2.yourdomain.com.
• Now wait until things propagate.