Hosting multiple domains and nameservers- I have no clue

[proone]

Merry christmas fellow VDR users.

I was wondering if anyone knows how to do this or knows where I can find some info on this. Thanks in advance!

I have a webserver in my home that works using the http://xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx format. I also have domain name registered.

How can I set up nameservers so that my domain points to my home ip address? (How do I set up an MX record on the WWW to point my domain to my home ip?) Do I have to have my own nameservers or can I use someone else's? I have no idea about this stuff but would love to learn.

Thanks in advance!

[Tuttle]

Oookay, lemme throw up some random points and see if they turn into a coherent answer:

You'll want someone else's nameservers. Running your own absolutely requires a static IP address, and you need at least two servers (which should really be on separate subnets and in separate physical locations).

ZoneEdit provides basic free DNS services for low to medium use. If you need more than that, I use easyDNS for US$20 per domain per year. They're probably not the cheapest, but they've been fantastic.

Once you have nameservers organised, there are two things you do to make the domain name work for you:

• Set up resource records (A, MX, etc) on the nameservers which resolve your domain name to your IP address.
• Update your domain registry entry with the IP addresses of your nameservers.

In day to day use, when a client wants to get to www.example.net, it queries the root DNS servers to find out the nameservers for .net, queries those servers to find the nameservers for example.net (that's the registry bit you need to configure second) and then queries those nameservers for www.example.net (that's the nameserver configuration bit you do first).

MX records are strictly an email thing. For other services you're looking for A records instead.

A records resolve names to IP addresses, eg discussions.virtualdr.com to 63.236.73.201.

MX records resolve domain names (the @example.net bit in an email address) to the hostnames of the mail exchangers for that domain. For example, virtualdr.com has MX records with values of mr1.iworld.com, mr2.iworld.com, boris.iworld.com and natasha.iworld.com. Each of those hosts needs an A record which converts it to an IP address. Each of those hosts is also running a mail server which will accept mail to @virtualdr.com addresses.

How's that for a start? What'd I miss?

[TropicalBound]

Another company that I've used for a few years now is TZO. An agent runs on your server and sends TZO your WAN IP address. Works great if you don't have a static IP address (or even dial up).

[Tuttle]

That's dynamic DNS. Most DNS providers offer that these days.

[proone]

Tuttle, I love you! Thank you so much for explaining all that to me. While I was waiting for a response, I stumbled across www.xname.org, a free dns service. I configured it but I don't think I configured it correctly. All I did was A record, no cname or mx. Here is a pic of my account on xname.


Fortunately, my cable company only dishes out new ip addresses about every 6-8 months so when that happens I can make the change manually. I don't think the update takes more than a few hours to take effect right? or maybe it is immediately.

[Tuttle]

Just an A record is fine as long as you don't want to receive email on that domain yet.

The way you've defined it, only going to example.net will work. If you want www.example.net to work too, create another A record with "www" and your IP address as values.

CNAME records resolve names to names -- for example, www.example.com might have a CNAME resolving to example.com, then example.com might have an A record. CNAMEs are generally a bad idea -- the above situation should be implemented with A records for both www.example.com and example.com, both with the same IP address. CNAMEs only really have a legitimate use when you're trying to follow changes across administrative boundaries.

Update speed depends on the TTL (time to live) of the domain, set on the nameservers. What happens is that when a client gets an answer from DNS, it'll remember it and re-use it for as long as that TTL before asking again. Most providers should let you lower that to about 5 minutes if you're expecting a change. About 24 hours is polite if you're expecting things to remain static.

[proone]

Whenever I do whois, tracert, or domain lookups, they come back with no ip address.

Do I have something set up wrong in this picture?

Thanks in advance

[Tuttle]

That looks right.

If DNS lookups are failing, are you sure you've given your domain registrar the IP addresses for your nameservers (and allowed a couple of days for the TTL to expire on the existing records)?

If you give me the domain name (via PM if necessary) I'll poke around in a bit more detail and tell you where it's broken.

[proone]

Hey it works now! Thank you so much for your help . I learned a great deal. Can I go to the mvp site and give you a point or feedback or anything?

[Tuttle]

Nah, it doesn't work that way. Just the thankyou here is enough.

[proone]

Which forums are you a member of? If you don't mind me asking...

[Tuttle]

Mainly here and HardwareCentral. I also spend a fair bit of time on IRC in DALnet's #Windows95 channel.

[Byan]

interesting stuff

all that DNS stuff always confuses the heck out of me

example for CNAME use- if you have an IRC network

florida.someIRC.net could forward to irc.myserver.com
ontario.someIRC.net could forward to irc.yourserver.com
those are still CNAME's right?

[Tuttle]

Right. And that's one of the places where CNAME use is actually legitimate -- the folks running DNS for someIRC.net probably aren't the ones running DNS for the individual servers.