I am using my linode to gain experience with hosting my websites myself rather than with the hosting services I have used before.

I have setup a ubuntu 10.04 server with virtualmin and it all seems to be ok.

However I am trying to understand the whole DNS thing, I have read the tutorials here and a few elsewhere but I am still struggling.

I have set-up my linode as ns1.mydomain.com and am using my hosts file to point to it. Since mydomain.com is currently active I have not done anything about changing the nameservers.

Now when I signed up for my linode I was given my networking info which had eth0 and its IP which I point to in hosts.
I also had 3 DNS servers listed but I am not sure what they are and how they are used. How do they relate to my linode?

In the past when I have set-up websites the hosting service has provided me with nameservers and sometimes the IP i.e. ns1.theirserver.com I would then enter that into the domain registrars set-up. With my linode where do I get this server from, should I use linodes DNS Manager? Or (if this is possible) should I use the virtualmin and use linodes DNS servers as slaves?

For someone with little experience, use linode's dns managers the nameservers are ns1...ns5.linode.com and are geographically spaced.

You can set up your own and have linode's be slaves to it but that requires you installing and configuring your own name server (not hard but it's one more thing to worry about).

You won't want to use your hosts file to point to ns1.mydomain.com unless you really are going to have ns1.mydomain.com be your linode.

The 3 DNS servers allow your linode to talk to the outside world using domain names.

Thanks for your help, but I feel really dumb at the moment. Can someone please give me and example of how the 3 dns servers are used and why?

You need to point your domain name to use Linode NameServers.

You do that at your domain registrar.

Then you need to setup whatever domain records you need via Linode's DNS manager.

All of this is pretty much covered in the Linode Library article

http://library.linode.com/linode-manage ... de-manager

If you are referring to the nameservers in /etc/resolv.conf, those are used by your server to lookup domain names, thus they are called resolvers.


This really depends upon how savvy you are and what you want to accomplish. Basically using Linode's DNS Manager, will make things much easier for you if you are not that experienced with DNS. I'm not a big fan of control panels, but if you are familiar with them go with what you know. Yes, you can use slave your DNS zones via linode's nameservers, not the resolvers.


Again, I'm assuming you are referring to the nameservers (resolvers) you are using either via your DHCP or from the LPM Network Configuration tab. To be able to lookup where your websites are requires authoritative DNS, the ones you give your domain registrar. So if you want Linode to be your authoritative DNS for your domain you would use ns1-5.linode.com at your registrar. The guide vonskippy provided should have the information you need to do that.

Hope that helps, if not ask away.

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Travis

Unfortunately, this article does not cover everything. I am also new to server admin (and Linux), and following this guide did not get mydomain.com pointed to my web server. I am running LAMP with Ubuntu 10.04 and have a wordpress site up and running fine.

Right now, mydomain.com tries to pull up /cgi-sys/defaultwebpage.cgi, which I assume is a default behavior of Apache.

The DNS configuration is set up following the guide. I also checked whois on mydomain.com to make sure it was pointing to Linode's nameservers.

I followed the steps found on these two pages to configure Apache: http://library.linode.com/web-servers/a ... 0.04-lucid

http://library.linode.com/lamp-guides/u ... tual_hosts

I still cannot load up my web site by going to mydomain.com.

What's the domain in question?

And, for what it's worth, I've never heard of nor seen /cgi-sys/defaultwebpage.cgi before, so I don't think that's default behavior....

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DNS only resolves Domain Names to IP's.

If that happens, then DNS is working correctly.

DNS has NOTHING to do with what your web engine does - that's all up to that engines config filess.

simiantext.com

I've been working on this problem all day...my next step is to see if Godaddy, my registrar, is messing something up. From what I understand though, if the whois shows the correct nameservers I should be okay.

yeah, it's not resolving to an ip, it's redirecting to a page that doesn't exist.

whois says you're currently pointed to ns1.linode.com and ns2.linode.com, which is the DNS Manager provided by linode (in the linode manager). If you've setup your own DNS servers, you need to change your registrar (godaddy) to point to that instead of linode.

Looks like you have something up now.

Oh god...I just tried loading in Chrome not Firefox and it was fine...cleared my cache in Firefox and it was fine there, too.

Sorry for wasting people's time...especially my own. (The site was on a previous host, so something must of stuck around from that).

Persistence - the mother of all solutions.