SOA (Start of Authority)

1. The @ symbol stands for the ORIGIN record (also known as the domain name)
2. The serial number will increment when the zone records are updated
3. The authoritative name server will not be changeable.
4. You may change the administrative email address, but the email address will be listed as user.domain.com. Remember the @ symbol is the origin so it can not be used within an email address.

IPV4 Addresses (A Records)

1. To set up a new A record, simply supply the host, the IP address to which the host will be directed and the time to live (TTL) setting. If you want to set up a zone record for your website, you might set up www as the host and then the IP address for your web server, and the TTL (Time To Live) setting as 1 day. You might also set up the @ (origin) record as the host and use the same IP address as you did for www. This way visitors can get to your site by typing either: http://www.domain.com or just http://domain.com.
2. If you want to use email (mail is a host), you might set up an A record for mail, pointing to either the same or a different IP address. A valid A record for mail must exist if you are uising an MX record (explained below)
3. The * refers to a wildcard and means any undefined hosts will be forwarded to that IP address.
4. TTL (Time To Live) is sent when an outside server queries our DNS for a specific zone. If the TTL is set to 1 day, and a specific server queries our DNS for your domain, then that specific server will NOT re-query our DNS again until the 1 day is up. Therefore if changes to the zone are made within that 1 day, users of that server will not see them until after the TTL has expired. The TTL only makes a difference when you MODIFY the record. If you ADD a new host, it will be available within a few minutes.

EXAMPLE:

Mail Exchanges (MX Records)

1. To set up a new MX record, supply the host (usually the origin @), the mail exchange (which must be a valid A record) to which the mail will be directed, a preference and a TTL setting.
2. The preference tells the zone what order it should attempt to deliver. It delivers to the lowest preference first.

EXAMPLE:

CNAME

1. A CNAME is an alias.
2. To set up a CNAME, simply supply the host, the canonical name and the TTL setting. A canonical name is the target to which the host will be aliased. For example, if I set up a CNAME for secure.abc.com ('secure' is the host) with a canonical name of www.gkg.net. ( make sure to add a period at the end of the canonical name or the record won't propagate correctly) anytime secure.abc.com is entered it will be aliased or redirected to www.gkg.net. (NOTE: CNAME records are not equivalent to URL Forwarding). 

TXT records

1. Zone information is available for public review by performing simple queries. When a zone record is queried, there is an optional space provided for TEXT. This space may be used to provide contact information or general information to the public. A Sender Policy Framework (SPF) record can also be set here to help prevent spammers from sending via your domain name.

Those are the basics for how DNS works, and how to set it up correctly using GKG's DNS Zone Hosting tools. There are of course hundreds of other possibilities and they can not all be explained here. However these examples above are the most common settings.