Verio DNS for Google Apps

A few tricky things to be aware of when using Verio hosted DNS and setting up a Google Apps domain …

Verio makes you fully qualify your domain names. always use a trailing dot when creating new records

Verio will not let you create a CNAME record that points to another CNAME. ghs.google.com is a CNAME to ghs.l.google.com so when creating the CNAME record for our typical gmail.domain.com you would need to point that to ghs.l.google.com. Verio will just tell you the record is invalid if you try to point it to ghs.google.com. in testing pointing to ghs.l.google.com functions well.

Verio forces you to have one MX record for www.domain.com pointing to a mail exchanger. if you create new MX records all for domain.com without the www and set those records to point to the Google MX servers then Verio will automatically create an additional MX record for www.domain.com that points to Verio’s mail server. Here’s an example of a properly configured Verio DNS for Google Apps:

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www.domain.com. 3600 IN MX 10 ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM.

domain.com. 3600 IN MX 10 ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM.

domain.com. 3600 IN MX 20 ALT1.ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM.

domain.com. 3600 IN MX 20 ALT2.ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM.

domain.com. 3600 IN MX 30 ASPMX2.GOOGLEMAIL.COM.

domain.com. 3600 IN MX 30 ASPMX3.GOOGLEMAIL.COM.

domain.com. 3600 IN MX 30 ASPMX4.GOOGLEMAIL.COM.

domain.com. 3600 IN MX 30 ASPMX5.GOOGLEMAIL.COM.

gmail.domain.com. 3600 IN CNAME ghs.l.google.com.

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Few things to note in that DNS zone file: the first MX record is www.domain.com. If we had configured our first MX record as just domain.com Verio would insert their own MX record and it messes with your email delivery. Also note the trailing dots to FQ the domain names.

In the default Verio DNS management interface, they only give you the option to set MX record values as “1st 2nd 3rd etc” they don’t let you define standard numeric MX priority values like Google’s suggested 10 20 30. To work around this click the checkbox for Text Area in the Editing Style. Once in this interface you can manually set the Google suggested MX priority’s as you see we have done with the above example.