SRV Records
Table of Contents
What’s an SRV record?
SRV records help with service discovery. For example, SRV records are used in Internet Telephony to define where a SIP service may be found.
An SRV record typically defines a symbolic name and the transport protocol used as part of the domain name. It defines the priority, weight, port, and target for the service in the record content.
Here’s an example of two SRV records.
_sip._tcp.example.com. 3600 IN SRV 10 60 5060 bigbox.example.com.
_sip._tcp.example.com. 3600 IN SRV 10 20 5060 smallbox1.example.com.
From the name, _sip is the symbolic name for the service and _tcp is the transport protocol. The symbolic name and transport always start with an underscore.
The content of the SRV record defines a priority of 10 for both records. The first record has a weight of 60 and the second a weight of 20. The priority and weight values can be used to encourage use of certain servers over others.
The final two values in the record define the port and hostname to connect to for accessing the service.
Add an SRV record
To add an SRV record in DNSimple, you might fill in the new SRV record form like this:
This would result in an SRV record like this:
_sip._tcp.example.com. 3600 IN SRV 10 20 5000 sip-server.example.com.