Beginners Problems - Can Anyone Help

[harveyf]

Just moved from a shared hosting environment to a VPS with Plesk 8.3.0, its a very steep learning curve so I have decided to try and find my way around with a couple of domains I dont use but have lurched into problems already!

The domain I want to use on the VPS is hosted with another provider.

In the plesk control panel I have set up the web using the default template which creates the following records

PTR Record
NS record
A Record
MS Record
CNAME for web site
CNAME for FTP
mail A Record
ns A Record
webmail A Record

All this looks fine and I can preview the site from within Plex, the site is the standard holding page but typing in the domain name or using FTP is not possible.


Where I am having problems is with actually getting the domain to point to the server and resolve correctly and I have to admit to being somewhat out of my depth here.

I understand that in the domain name admin panel at the domain hosting company I have to redirect to the VPS. I have used this feature before to point the domains to my existing shared hosting provider, they are not the same. It was simply a case of setting the primary and secondary name servers to the hosting provider ns1.xxx.net, ns2.xxx.net etc

The first question is should I have Plesk set up as the master DNS or Secondary DNS and then following from that what information should I need to enter into the domain admin system

Would the primary name server be still remain with the domain company and the secondary point to the nameserver in plesk or should I be directing both primary and secondary nameservers to the ns.mydomainname.com that plesk has set up

I am very confused as you can probably tell so any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

[shaunish]

youve got a lot of questions, and i havent got much time atm, but you should set your name servers at wherever you hosted your domains to the ip address of your server, then test it with ping, - > just ping www.yoursite.com and if it resolves to your webservers ip you are all set.

 

[faris]

There are two ways of doing this.

If you will only ever have your one domain in plesk and want a quick solution, use the normal DNS controls that your registrar probably provides to change the A record for domain.com to point to the IP of your plesk server, add a similar record for www.yourdomain.com (or create a CNAME that points to the A record). Then create an MX record pointing to yourdomain.com. (similarly for webmail.yourdomain.com create an A record or a CNAME).

However all this is a bit of a waste of time in a way.

What you realy want to do is create your own ns1.xxx.net and ns2.xxx.net - i.e. ns1.yourdomain.com and ns2.yourdomain.com. Note that ns1 and ns2 are just used as a convention. You could create namesevers called bah.yourdomain.com and humbug.yourdomain.com if you wanted.

And that's the key -- the creation of nameserver host records for yourdomain.com. You do this via your registrar. It will not be on the same page as where you adjust A records and MX records and so on. It is likely to be a separate option. It will ask you for a name (e.g. ns1.yourdomain.com) and an IP address (which you specify as the IP of your Plesk box). Similarly for NS2, only you'll need to specify the second IP of your Plesk box (.....you should have two IPs....if you don't then you may be able to get away with specifyin the same IP but really you should have two separate ones but that's another story).

Once you have done that, you change the namservers associated with yourdomain.com to your newly created namservers ns1.yourdomain.com and ns2.yourdomain.com

What happens is that when someone looks up yourdomain.com the first thing that happens is that the nameservers associated with the domain are discovered. This tells whatever is looking for your domain where to look for DNS info for it. In order to do this, the IP addresses of those ns1 and ns2 addresses are needed. This is where those namserver host records come in (it is called glue and breaks the chicken and egg situation).

Now that the IP addresses of ns1 and ns2 are known, a DNS quiry can be sent to one of those addresses --- i.e. your Plesk box (your VPS).

And on your Plesk box you'll have Bind running, which answers the DNS quiry to say that yourdomain.com is at your VPS's IP address. Done!

Now, in terms of what you need to have configured as the DNS in Plesk for yourdomain.com, as we as the usual A and MX records you also need two NS records.

The default template just adds ns.yourcomain.com -> IP address of your plesk box. This is no good because you creates ns1 and ns2. So delete that record and create NS records ns1.yourdomain.com and ns2.yourdomain.com pointing to your VPS's IP. That's another part of the chicken and egg bit I mentioned earlier.

It would also be nice to have PTR record for yourdomain.com and that should have been added automatically.

However you shoudl remove this from the main DNS template in the Server page in Plesk because there should only be one PTR record per IP. Anyway it won't be used by anuthing other than your own box since PRT records for your IP will be set up by whoever you have rented your VPS from.

Whew! I hope this isn't as clear as mud.

Please allow at least 24 hours for the creation of your ns1 and ns2 namserver host records to be processed, and similarly another 24 hours or so when you change the nameservers to your own ns1 and ns2 on your domain.

Any future domains you want to add on your plesk box just have to have their namservers set to ns1.yourdomain.com and ns2.yourdomain.com (and the right DNS records in Plesk - no PTR remember. No need for the default ns.domain.com either -- remove them form the default template in the Server page remember. You can add ns1.yourdomain.com and ns2.yourdomain.com if you like instead of the default ns.domain.com in that default template.

Arrgh. I've gone off on a tangent again.

One more thing before I finish -- use www.dnsreport.com to test your domain once you have allowed some time for everything to update (e.g. 24 hours).

Faris.