The Misery of Requesting DNS Changes

For those of you that support clients or even manage your own organization's IT, I ask you this simple question: Have you ever had to request a record change from your DNS provider and sat there wondering...no, praying... if it would go correctly?

I pray to the gods of all religions every time I have to request a change in a MX or A record. Recently, a client of mine moved to the Postini antispam system. As part of this, we needed to create four new MX records and eliminate the old one, which had the format of mail.myclient.com. However, we needed to retain the mail.myclient.com host (A) record because the client used it for Web access to the mail system.

Knowing full well what might transpire when I sent the request to the DNS provider, I very explicitly stated: "Please delete the MX record of mail.myclient.com. However, please do NOT delete the corresponding host (A) record."

I thought that directive was fairly clear. The provider responded that he made the change and even included a copy of the zone file to prove his case. But what I found when reviewing the file was that he left the MX record intact and deleted only the A record.

So, this obviously illiterate support person made two flagrant violations:

1. He did not follow my instructions. In fact, he did just the opposite of what I requested.
2. He created an invalid MX configuration for the client, since the MX record had no corresponding host record. As a result, the client lost email and it took another 36 hours for me to track down a knowledgeable support person to make the correction.

I'm still wondering exactly how I need to communicate the request so that it will be understood. As indicated, it seemed clear to me when I wrote it. Perhaps I just need to take control of the DNS myself with an account at DynDNS or other such provider rather than letting the client's ISP manage it. Or maybe I need to sacrifice a goat to the DNS gods. I don't know...

-TQG