I need to change the DNSs of my domain, and I’m getting an error that the DNSs aren’t registered. Maybe they simply haven’t propogated yet, but it ocurred to me that what I’m doing seems kind of recursive. If my domain is example.com and my DNSs are ns1.example.com and ns2.example.com, is there a problem with doing that? It seems like I’m trying to point the domain to itself. And in case you’re wondering, I didn’t set up the custom DNSs. My hosting company did it when they created the account.

I tried using the IP addresses, but I got an error, saying “invalid TLD.”

You need to create “glue records” at your domain registrar.

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I have an instance running on Amazon EC2. I need to point my domain example.com at 1und1 to this instance. How do I do this?

I’m not familiar with 1&1′s interface, but it looks like you can set up A records using their DNS service. You should follow the instructions on their page to point your domain name to an IP address.

You can find out what your instance IP is in the Amazon EC2 console. Click on an instance name in the instances list. Directly below the name will be the public IP for that instance. I have attached a screenshot for clarity:

In this example, the public IP address is 249.212.101.96. This is the IP address you should enter in Step 5 of the instructions on the 1&1 site.

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I have a simple domain with a single Win2003 server. I just upgraded the funcitonal level to Win2003.

I am now trying to add a Win2012 DC, but it warns me that the functional level is still at w2000

I upgraded it 5 minutes ago, with a single DC, do I have to wait longer? Is something else going on?

Do have have to prep the domain and forest BEFORE I add the win2012 DC? Or after?

Did you raise the Domain functional level or the Forest functional level? You need to raise the Forest functional level to Windows 2003. Forest prep and Domain prep will run during the Windows Server 2012 DCPROMO process.

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I have a domain with Win2012 DC’s, and a bunch of Win2003 servers.

Is it save to raise the functional level of the forest and domain to Windows 2012?

Yes.

Member servers don’t typically care what the FFL and DFL is – only domain controllers. As long as all your DCs are 2012, then go for it. And you don’t have a bunch of other stuff that you’re not telling us like “oh yeah and I have a trust to an NT4 domain in a branch office,” or “oh yeah my org is still on Exchange 2000.”

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This may be a redundant questions, but is there any benefit to using name servers with a registar provider vs. a hosting provider?

Some shared hosting accounts through places like 1&1 ask that you use their name servers when using an external domain through a different registar.

Are there benefits to this? Is it completely reliant on the companies resources that you are using?

As you might have guessed, there’s both advantages and disadvantages to using your own Name Servers vs. your hosting provider’s vs. your Domain Registrar’s (if the hosting provider & and the domain registrar are two separate entities).

In either of the three scenarios, yes, at the end of the day, it all boils down to the “company’s resources” of whom you’re using. But some companies are bigger than others and have more resources than others. At the same time, these bigger companies are more vulnerable (visible) to being attacked (DDoS attacks, for example).

There’s also the chance that someone could fat-finger a configuration change for one of these large providers (think: Amazon’s infamous April 2011 Outage or GoDaddy’s recent DNS Outage.

At the end of the day, my opinion is that there’s not much of a difference between the hosting provider vs. the domain registrar if they are separate entities UNLESS you are working with a small hosting provider that doesn’t have the technical know how but think they do. (I emphasize this, because there’s several smaller hosting providers that certainly DO know how to manage their DNS appropriately).

However, your hosting provider may have a number of features that integrate nicely into a “DNS Manager” which then easily integrates into their services as a hosting provider. I can’t think of any good examples off the top of my head, but this would be 1 good reason why it might make sense to go with the hosting provider vs. the registrar.

That answers your question (I think), but here’s a couple of related thoughts I have on the subject of hosting DNS (self-hosting vs. domain registrar vs. hosting provider):

I’m not saying that companies that self-host their DNS are vulnerable to the issues Godaddy experienced earlier this year as well. However, they are smaller targets, and let’s face it: nobody values a company’s website as much as you (the owner) do. You’re going to pull out all the stops to get it back online.

My personal preference is to manage our own DNS servers, because we have the expertise to keep them operational, and we have worked to ensure redundancy, should 1 of the DNS servers fail. (But we’re also a hosting provider too, so it only makes sense that we provide this offering).

Outside of this bias, I’m also of the opinion that companies that have the technical know-how should be willing to self-host their DNS for the reasons I’ve stated above. I’m a huge advocate for it, and at the end of the day, it puts the control of the domain into the hands of the owner, which is where it should be.

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I have been tasked by my instructor to setup a DNS server. But I don’t really know if I’m doing it the right way. I am unable to resolve/ping/nslookup the name server. Syslog sais the ns1 is lame.

I am using four Ubuntu clients with VirtualBox, one of them configured to be the DNS server. I’ve set up an bridged virtual network and all hosts are able to ping eachother. I use these IP addresses inside the DNS configuration. Everything seems to be alright but I cannot reach the ns1.example.com even though it’s supposed to be the main DNS.

The task: Setup DNS server with a domain and a subdomain.
Main domain: SOA, NS for both domain and subdomain, glue record and A record for the subdomain.
Subdomain: SOA, NS, glue and A records. Should also have mail and www records.

Please tell me my errors here. I’m constantly reading new stuff and changing the configuration but I can never get to the point where nslookup works for all the addresses, unless I remove the subdomain and add sub.domain.com as a simple A record, but that wont cut it.

named.conf.local

zone "domain.com"
{
        type master;
        file "/etc/bind/zones/domain.com.db";
};zone "sub.domain.com"
{
        type master;
        file "/etc/bind/zones/sub.domain.com.db";
};zone "0.168.192.in-addr.arpa"
{
        type master;
        file "/etc/bind/zones/0.168.192.in-addr.arpa";
};

domain.com.db

$TTL 3D; TTL default, 3 dagardomain.com.  IN      SOA     ns1.domain.com. admin.domain.com. (
2012122104; Serialnumber
28800;
3600;
604800;
38400
); Maindomain name servers
domain.com.                   IN      NS      ns1.domain.com.
sub.domain.com.               IN      NS      ns2.sub.domain.com.
; Main domain A records
ns1.domain.com.               IN      A       192.168.1.92
ns2.sub.domain.com.           IN      A       192.168.1.84

sub.domain.com.db

$TTL 3D$ORIGIN sub.domain.com.@  IN      SOA     ns2.sub.domain.com. admin.sub.domain.com. (
2012122104; Serialnumber
28800;
3600;
604800;
38400
); Sub-domain
                IN      NS      ns2.sub.domain.com.
domain.com.     IN      NS      ns1.domain.com.; Mailserver for subdomain
                IN      MX 10   mail.sub.domain.com.; A records for subdomain
ns2             IN      A       192.168.1.84
ns1.domain.com. IN      A       192.168.1.92; Glue records for subdomain
mail            IN      A       192.168.1.89
www             IN      A       192.168.1.72; Canonical names for subdomain
stuff        IN      CNAME   www

in-addr.arpa

$TTL 3D
@ IN SOA ns1.domain.com. admin.domain.com. (
2012122103;
28800;
604800;
604800;
86400
);        IN  NS  ns1.domain.com.
        IN  NS  ns2.sub.domain.com.
92      IN  PTR ns1.domain.com.
92      IN  PTR ns2.sub.domain.com.
74      IN  PTR www.sub.domain.com.
89      IN  PTR mail.sub.domain.com.

Happy Holidays! ;>

Edit: I have comined it into one file, using ORIGIN$ and I can reach the ns1, but none of the subs…

I maintain a single name server but have several sub-domains so I use the $ORIGIN trick mentioned in the O’Reilly DNS & Bind book referenced here.

/var/named/chroot/var/named/data/db.192.168.1

$ORIGIN .
$TTL 604800 ; 1 week
1.168.192.in-addr.arpa      IN SOA  ns.me.local. hostmaster.me.local. (
                            2000075001 ; serial
                            28800      ; refresh (8 hours)
                            7200       ; retry (2 hours)
                            604800     ; expire (1 week)
                            86400      ; minimum (1 day)
                            )
                    NS      ns.me.local.
$ORIGIN 1.168.192.in-addr.arpa.
1                   PTR     mulder.me.local.
101                 PTR     flanders.me.local.
102                 PTR     lisa.me.local.
....
....

/var/named/chroot/var/named/data/db.me.local

$ORIGIN .
$TTL 604800 ; 1 week
me.local            IN SOA  ns.me.local. hostmaster.me.local. (
                            2000075000 ; serial
                            28800      ; refresh (8 hours)
                            7200       ; retry (2 hours)
                            3600000    ; expire (5 weeks 6 days 16 hours)
                            86400      ; minimum (1 day)
                            )
                    NS      ns.me.local.
                    A       192.168.1.1
                    MX      10 mail.me.local.
                    MX      20 me.local.
                    TXT     "v=spf1 mx/24 ~all"
$ORIGIN me.local.
apu                 A       192.168.1.112
                    HINFO   "VZ12" "VZ12"
                    MX      10 mail
                    TXT     "v=spf1 redirect=me.local"
bart                A       192.168.1.103
                    HINFO   "VZ3" "VZ3"
                    MX      10 mail
                    TXT     "v=spf1 redirect=me.local"
...
...
$INCLUDE            "data/subdomain-somedom1.org.sub"
$INCLUDE            "data/subdomain-somedom2.org.sub"

/var/named/chroot/var/named/data/subdomain-somedom1.org.sub

$ORIGIN somedom1.org.me.local.
blogs               CNAME   blogs.me.local.

/var/named/chroot/var/named/data/subdomain-somedom2.org.sub

$ORIGIN somedom2.org.me.local.
bender              CNAME   bender.me.local.
farnsworth          CNAME   farnsworth.me.local.
fry                 CNAME   fry.me.local.
leela               CNAME   leela.me.local.

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long time ago I bought a cheap hosting and it came with a domain name. but now I want more control over my domain name, and their cheap panel just don’t have access to edit the entries. the only thing I can edit is the dns server address nameserver address.

are there some free/pay dns server which I can change to, and will allow me to have full control over the dns table of my domain? or the only way is to do a transfer

If you can edit the nameserver address(es) for the domain, which I assume is what you meant by “the dns server address”, then you can sign up for external DNS services like ZoneEdit. The DNS provider you select should tell you what values to set your domain nameservers to.

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I got two domains, which are pointing on the same IP address, I can use both to connect to the server or certain port (TeamSpeak), the problem is that I would like the only one domain from those two to be working while connecting to a certain port.

Eg.

example.com points at the 11.22.33.44 — allow connection to the certain port from this domain.

sample.com points at the 11.22.33.44 — disallow connection to the port specified above from this domain.

I know this would be possible for the IP addresses, but would it be possible for the domains?

On the OS level, no, it’s not possible, because firewall is not going to do DNS lookup for every packet, as it would slow the processing down unacceptably. It may however be possible in the application you’re using, if it does DNS lookup for each connection and supports connection filtering based on DNS names. It depends on the application.

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I think I’ve got myself a bit lost here. Basically I have a private server, a .com domain registered at one place, and using clouDNS.net as a DNS server. I tried hosting my own DNS server but it got a bit too confusing.

My domain register has the clouDNS nameservers set up, and at clouDNS I have the nameservers linked to my domain, but where do I link the domain to my server IP address?

Thanks!

Just add records for your server. A simple lookup requires at least an A (IPv4) or AAAA (IPv6) record to exist, for mail and other services one can set up others. For subdomains this is valid too, just repeat that.

I think a simple how-to on configuring DNS might help you out. For example this one.

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I have been a happy customer of MyDomain.com, which handles domain stuff for http://JonathansCorner.com, which is my personal site handled correctly and http://JonathanHayward.com, which is CNAMEd to http://JonathansCorner.com where it normally serves up a professional site, but now serves up an imitation domain name speculator site because MyDomain includes free parking service and this parking trumps CNAMEs, with some dumbed-down menu choices that do not have information scent for “I made a CNAME choice; please respect it.”

Most of my domains are CNAMEd, usually referring to the server with my personal site.

What should I do now? Manual override for each CNAMEd domain? Re-evaluate my provider? Add more detail to the support ticket (it says that CNAMEd domains have CNAME trumped by parking)? Decide it’s time for a service that drapes slightly dirty pictures of girls?

With MyDomain for NOW…

It is not valid to have a CNAME at the top level. By setting one you have probably broken you zone.

You cannot use a CNAME for jonathanhayward.com.

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