[NCSA-discuss] DNS Questions

[Derek Featherston]

Background:
Our current authoritative DNS servers are outsourced to a hosting company
called AIT.  They also host our web and mail servers.  Now we are finally
bringing email in-house (Kerio MailServer - if anyone has any
experience/comments, please share), and we would like to have our
authoritative DNS servers moved to our ISP or some other provider.  (Again,
if anyone has a suggestion on a DNS hosting provider I'm open to
suggestions.)

Questions:
How do I go about making such a transition?  Do I need to contact AIT, or
can my ISP/provider simply seize the zone?  I'd prefer to deal as little
with AIT as possible.  Will it be necessary for us to re-register our domain
name through a different registrar?  I've never dealt with any of these
aspects of DNS before, and I've never personally registered or re-registered
a domain, so any insight would be greatly appreciated.  And a step-by-step
suggested procedure would be wonderful.

FWIW, here's a whois query for our domain:

   Domain Name: CIRRUSPHARM.COM
   Registrar: THE NAME IT CORPORATION DBA NAMESERVICES.NET
   Whois Server: whois.aitdomains.com
   Referral URL: http://www.aitdomains.com
   Name Server: NS1.AITCOM.NET
   Name Server: NS0.AITCOM.NET
   Status: ACTIVE
   Updated Date: 25-dec-2001
   Creation Date: 25-dec-2001
   Expiration Date: 25-dec-2011

Thanks in advance,

Derek Featherston
Systems Administrator
derek.featherston at cirruspharm.com
Cirrus Pharmaceuticals, Inc.