A client of mine purchased VD hosting with Godaddy and a domain name with Mediatemple. I've never configured DNS from scratch, and I'm finding it very difficult to find any sort of explanation on how to go about it.

As of right now, Mediatemple is pointing to the Godaddy's ns1.domaincontrol.com and ns2.domaincontrol.com nameservers. The VD hosting on Godaddy (via their Simple Control Panel) has options to "Add a new domain", which brings you through a wizard of sorts that asks you if the domain has already been registered (yes), what it is (dclowd9901.com for this example), create a system username and password for it (with checkboxes for SSH and FTP access), which level of user can administer it, and whether a mail account should be setup.

When complete, it also creates a zone file. In this zone file, the Primary nameserver is ns1.dclowd9901.com; the records are as follow (where 12.23.12.34 is the presumed host):

@     A     12.23.12.34
@     NS    ns1
@     NS    ns2
ns1   A     12.23.12.34
ns2   A     12.23.12.34
@     MX    mail
www   A     12.23.12.34
ftp   A     12.23.12.34
ssh   A     12.23.12.34
mail  A     12.23.12.34

If anyone can shed any light on this for me, explain to me the interactions between the registrar and the host and so on, I'd be very grateful. Thanks in advance for the help.