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.
