I've been looking through the forums for a while and see a LOT of talk about setting up DNS through your own personal Linode... but I can't find any decent documentation a complete newbie to DNS'ing in linux can understand....

I already have my domain's Nameservers point to my 3 linode ip's... what would I do next say to create www.mydomain.com and get it work? or how about getting blah.mydomain.com to forward to my linode?

Could someone please post a simple walkthrough or something I can go by? I'm sure it would help a lot of others out there as well...

-- Griswald

Hi,

So you have registed nameservers to the IPs.

So you have ns1.domain registered etc.

Via your domain registrar?


In that case you need to set-up bind.

Try this tutorial it is very good.

http://www.unixwiz.net/techtips/bind9-chroot.html


Adam

Thanks!

That was written for red-hat, but perhaps I can use it in mandrake as well (just need to find alot of the stuff, since it's in a diff place, but all of it is preinstalled )

Thanks again. =]

-- Griswald

Hi,

I followed it to install on debian.

Most guidence docs seem to be written for RedHat, you will soon learn how to modify them to the OS of your choice.

Adam

Yeah, that and the post made by you on another topic helped out a LOT. I managed to get it working wonderfully under mandrake.

http://www.linode.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=406

it seems I forgot to set the reverse DNS on my ips to the nameservers of my website, and I can nolonger ping them.... perhaps they got blocked by linode? However, I recently took and changed the reverse DNS entries when I suddenly realized this.

-- Griswald

Reverse DNS has nothing to do with domain lookups.

Forward DNS is for domain looksup Domain name to IP address

Reverse DNS is IP address to Domain name

Adam

I just thought I would check.

Are you using an IP address per website?

Adam

Nah, the 3 ip's are for my nameservers.

I figured according to the linode website, if you use the ips when you could use hostnames, it'd block that specific thing from working... so I changed my reverse dns entries from *.members.linode.com to my nameservers, and all was fine again... Could they have actually been blocked from since I didn't set them in reverse DNS?

-- Griswald

I dont really understand what you are asking.

Adam

Well, I'm not really asking anything anymore. I found out that it was all an error on my behalf on something I didn't understand. I didn't know you had to add a dns "A" line entry for your own nameservers to work (since godaddy DNS' them for me).

Anyway, after I added the A lines to my nameservers, my domain instantly started working and all is well.

If anyone else has any trouble in DNS'ing their domain, I can post some basic instructions to get it up (after all, I went from a complete n00b to suddenly understanding how to do all this )

-- Griswald

Another note on this subject. In your first post I read it as you have 3 IPs for one linode and you are using these for ns1, ns2, and ns3. The point of having multiple name servers is making sure that there is a backup available in case the primary ns is unavailable/overloaded/some other funky shiznit.

You might check out http://www.zoneedit.com/ they will do dns for up to five domains for free. This would allow you to run your primary ns yourself and use them as a backup.

Of course, if all your name servers do is point various domains to the same IP address, then there's no special advantage to having the nameservers up when the http and smtp servers they point to are down. Yes, this is heresy, I know, but I never quite figured out why DNS is considered to be so much more important than the services people actually want.

(And I'm actually using xname.org for secondary DNS for my domains. But I'm not clear how I benefit, besides the joy that comes from adhering to published standards )

A bit of clarification, for future DNS admin newbies: Once you've changed your domain's nameservers at your domain registry, nobody else can provide DNS for them; even if they appear in (say) godaddy's DNS, nothing will look there for them. The hook ("delegation") for the parent domain only uses the IP address (even though it often shows the name). Thus, A records for your nameservers are required, at least for the nameservers which are in your domain.

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