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Additional Steps To Assure Viewable Alerts and Warnings

Websites are sometimes accessed without the www  extension in front of the domain address. Some people do not type in the the www in front of the web address. In order for alerts and warnings to be viewable in this web address presentation the website's 'A' record needs to also point to the www address.  To accomplish this you or your IT web developer should make an EXTERNAL dns server change for the non www web address to point to the www website as in the below EXTERNAL dns server example:


EXAMPLE...  yourwebsite.com 

yourwebsite.com IN A  www.yoursite.com


Long Term Setup of Emergency Use
The directions on the previous page will allow emergency alerts to appear for a limited period of time, of less than two weeks on your site.  In the event of a major disaster or catastrophe you can also have your website address available for alerts and warnings.

FastCommand offers its DNS servers as slave servers. 
This process is especially important for websites who may have geographically concentrated name servers that might be localy compromised during a disaster.   You are encouraged to incorporatge FastCommand servers into your DNS infrastructure in order to assure you website address is active after a large disaster.  This assures emergency details can be distributed through your website for the long term.

The steps for incorporating FastCommand name servers into your DNS infrastructure are:
1.  Permit slave zone replication from your primary name server to ns1, ns2,ns4.fastadmins.info, and kansas1.fasthealth.com
2.  After FastCommand servers have replicated the zone, add
ns1.fastadmins.info, ns2.fastadmins.info, and kansas1.fasthealth.com to your domain registry.

View Internet Alerts By Changing Internal DNS to External
To view activated Internet alerts inside your own network you will want to make sure a non-cached version of your website is accessable when altered for alerts. In order to retrieve your website to see an alert in use you need to make sure you follow the below DNS server directions:

1) Locate records on your INTERNAL DNS server referring to your domain or "www" (i.e. yourwebsite.com or 
www.yourwebsite.com or just "www").

2) Remove these records and restart your Internal DNS, this will force future queries to use the External DNS settings configured in the previous steps and allow viewing of Internet Alerts inside your network. 

The FastCommand technical and support staff are available to begin setup of FastCommand name servers. Please call 205-752-5050 Extension 0 for help with any questions. Ask for Charlie or Nate.