BPOS and DNS Configuration : warning if your domain is at Gandi

Recently, I have decided to evaluate BPOS (Business Productivity Online Services), the Hosted offer of Microsoft. Basically, I want to use Exchange to host my personnal mail (OWA and Antivirus/Antispam) and also use Sharepoint/MOSS.

With BPOS, you “rent” this strong service online, via Microsoft infrastructure.

Once your subsciption is ok, you need to add a CNAME DNS record in order to “redirect” traffic to the hosted service.

I bought my personal domain at Gandi, so had to do it via their administration interface.

I spent more than 3 weeks to undestand why this DNS record was not working. 2 different behaviors : in BPOS console I received an arror, saying that my domain cannot be verified 2) Ping fail diring name resolution.

After a lot of tests, I found that in fact it is due to Gandi administration cosole.

Check this :

 

Here you can see the console. The “…Microsoftonline.com” record is the one I needed. But look at the top, there is a shortcut(link) that says in french “interface de gestion de zone” (zone management interface). What is this ? as you can also see, it is talking about a “Gandi zone 2008”. I am confused ?

If you click this link you can discover that in fact, when you do a modification it creates sort of “temporary” configuration. If you stay at that level, this TEMP config is not acticated so your configuration is not working.

On the interface below, I had to explicitly click the “par defaut” (default) link to activate that “gandi zone 2008”.

 

This procedure is very strange.

Since I spent a few weeks, good to share that with the community.

Comments

• Anonymous
  June 19, 2011
  thanks, it was useful for me (i need to wait the change) I want to use the gandi blog , Do i need to add a CName entry as well? si.gendry@laposte.net Simon