who is using SchoolDNS?

[William Hamilton]

I am looking for feedback on how people find SchoolDNS and how popular it is as a service.

https://www.education.govt.nz/education-professionals/schools-year-0-13/digital-technology/schooldns-domain-name-registration-service

None of the schools I help out are using it and I have been working with one new school to figure out who manages their DNS to find that noone has knowledge/passwords etc. Oh well

W

[Stephen Caustick]

Hi William,

Maybe I have misread this, but if you use a tool like https://mxtoolbox.com/, it will tell you who manages the DNS by entering the domain name.

We have moved to SchoolDNS this month. So far, no issues, but we do need to ask them to make changes, unlike other providers, say, CloudFlare.

Regards,

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Ngā mihi

Stephen Caustick

IT Technician

Hastings Boys' High School

(06) 8730365 ex 847

[William Hamilton]

Thanks Stephen, I used dig to find the details of the domain but the tech/admin contact listed does not manage the DNS but it is on their registrar they tell me.  I did not recognise the DNS server names but have tracked it down..  waiting on credentials now to confirm details before tidying things up :)

Asking them to make changes sounds like a pain and fairly easy to chew up the cost of a paid registrar when counted against a support person's hourly rate... I was not aware that they did not have a management interface.  Good to know!

cheers

W

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[Jeffrey B]

School DNS is a good service, does have a UI so you can make changes yourself and keeps a track of the domain names so they don't expire or get hijacked.  That and its free, also gives the school an easy point of contact to recover it if needed. Well worth using when you recover them.  Easiest way I have found is asking the school accounts person for bills from website/spark/teleco provider.  You can then call the appropriate help desk with the account number to start the transfer.  You get up to two free domains with it so worth checking if you can get -your school acronym- ysa.nz as well.

Jeffrey.

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From: techies-f...@googlegroups.com <techies-f...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of William Hamilton <william....@gmail.com>
Sent: Sunday, October 19, 2025 9:45:49 PM
To: techies-f...@googlegroups.com <techies-f...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: [techies-for-schools] who is using SchoolDNS?

 

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[Sheldon Lendrum]

We moved around 20 school's domains to the service over the last year or so as they came up from renewal. 

I was originally skeptical about it, and didn't want (Both ourselves and our Schools) to lose any ability to manage the domains, for the sake of $40/year.

But, you can keep your existing Name Servers, As we use CloudFlare for it's Security/DDoS/SSL/Caching services we were able to keep doing this. 

Transfer is a manual process, we email the domain details and UDAI key to their support team, they do the transfer an email to confirm, no UI to transfer domains, but you can manage contacts in the UI. (And DNS but we don't use that). 

Be careful with the manual process, we had one domain that we transferred to the, got an acknowledgment that they had completed the transfer - but for any reason, it didn't and the domain didn't transfer and expired, lucky it our monitoring we picked it up early on the morning of.. That's the issue with the manual transfer I guess. 

Sheldon Lendrum

Director

07 281 1600

she...@inboxdesign.co.nz

            

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[Pete Mundy]

I've moved a small number of domains that way and I was going to +1 for SchoolDNS until I read that! What a nightmare.

The school was lucky to have your oversight & monitoring Sheldon.

Pete

On Mon, 20 Oct 2025 at 08:11, 'Sheldon Lendrum' via Techies for schools <techies-f...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

<snip>had one domain that we transferred to the, got an acknowledgment that they had completed the transfer - but for any reason, it didn't and the domain didn't transfer and expired, lucky it our monitoring we picked it up early<snip>

[Andrew Hood]

Hi,

As the product manager for the service (and the person that put it in place originally), then feel free to reach out to me if anyone has questions. Of course I think this is a great service! We set this up because of the number of schools that were losing DNS access due to staff changes or lack of use and then having to end up working with the DNC to get control back. The middle of an security incident is not the time to find that you can't get access to your DNS!

A few key differences between SchoolDNS and other DNS registrars:

• It's free (well, schools don't pay for it)
• Yes - there is a WebUI so you can make changes just like any other DNS hosting providers
• You can use your preference for Name Servers if you want to keep your existing servers
• Whilst you can transfer in two domains, you don't get a second domain unless you already are owning and using two domains
• ICT's can have an account to manage multiple schools zone files (only if using SchoolDNS name servers)
• Schools can call up to make changes if they are not able to correctly do this themselves, but we encourage self service via the WebUI

Feel free to ask questions.

Thanks,

Andrew

Andrew Hood

​​
Senior Product Manager


The Network for Learning Ltd


M +64 29 200 3774 P 0800 LEARNING
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[William Hamilton]

Thanks again everyone for the feedback on this service.  I will get this school tidied up and have a chat with them about shifting over to SchoolDNS - we have a few months before things expire thankfully!

W

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