Using DNS to point one hostname to another

[Brian Sierakowski]

Hey, I had an issue today where we have an A record set up in our DNS server to get to our webmail: mail.mycompany.com. This points to the IP for mail.google.com/a/mycompany.com, which usually works fine.

Today, I got a call from the office (I work remotely usually), and they said that they couldn't get to mail.mycompany.com. I tested it from my machine and it worked, but via my VPN it didn't, and I VNCed into his laptop just to see that he wasn't making an obvious mistake. I tried pointing his browser directly to mail.google.com/a/mycompany.com, and it was able to get there.

It turns out that the IP for mail.google.com/a/mycompany.com changed, I don't know if this has anything to do with them moving out of beta... but it's happened a few times before (once or twice). The biggest issue is that our network is going to assume that mail.mycompany.com is local, since our domain is mycompany.com, so we have to assign it to an IP using an A record.

Here's my question; is there a type of record that we can use to say "I know this looks like it's internal, but it is actually external, please use an external dns"? Or, is there any DNS record that can map a hostname to a hostname? Set up a record that says resolve mail.mycompany.com to mail.google.com/a/mycompany.com? I've messed with dname records and such, but nothing seems to be working quite right.

I just wanted to see if there was a good solution so I can fix the problem and not just provide a solution. WCS, I will just update everyone in the office to the mail.google.com/a/mycompany.com link and we'll not have to worry about it again.

Thanks!!

-Brian

[Sparda]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CNAME_record

[Brian Sierakowski]

Third edit is the charm... CNAME works wonderfully, I see why I could not get it to work before :).

Thanks!

-Brian