DNS and Subdomains

[Chris Hunter]

I'm migrating from 9.x to 10.4 (I just updated to the newest) and have run into quite an issue when I migrated a domain that has a lot of subdomains. It seems with the new version, each subdomain has it's own DNS zone record. I have several servers that are serving DNS to our main servers and this method just seems to be quite a nightmare to manage.

Is there a way to force it back to creating A records when you create a subdomain instead of creating a new zone record? I can't seem to find any information on this (yes I've Googled and searched this forum first.).

Any thoughts??

Thanks in advance!!

 

[Chris Hunter]

I have another server with 10.3 on it and it does not create a new zone record for a subdomain. Soo.... this must be just a 10.4 thing.

Is there a checkbox somewhere that I'm missing that I can uncheck that will keep Plesk from creating a new zone record for each subdomain? It would be a TON easier to just create an A record in the main zone file.

 

[IgorG]

Could you please clarify a little bit what do you mean "quite a nightmare to manage"? Yes, it is new feature of 10.4 and I would like to know how it is affect you that now each subdomain has own zone?

 

[Chris Hunter]

Igor,

Of course. We have 10 Plesk servers, some running 9.x and some running 10.x. We are working on migrating customers from 9.x to 10.x. Each server is serving up DNS to two slave servers using zone transfers. The problem that we're running into is that with the new method of having a zone record for each subdomain - our scripts to pull the zone records are only pulling the main records and not the new subdomain record files.

So for instance when we create a new domain, there are cron jobs on three servers (the plesk server the client is going on, ns1 and ns2) that run periodically to update dns. Ns1.domain.com and Ns2.domain.com should pull the records from server1.domain.com, server2..domain.com, etc... However, it's not pulling the subdomains and there's really no way to write a cron script to even know that a subdomain exists that I can see.

The only way to do that that I can see is that we would have to write a script to parse the main zone record first to figure out if there's a subdomain that exists -- and that's just a logistical and programming nightmare.

Again - this must have been a change from 10.3 to 10.4 and I cannot find any documentation on it. Is there a way to revert it back to how Plesk USED to do it? This will definitely mess up our internal structure for DNS as we migrate customers over. HELP!

 

[Chris Hunter]

LOL - ok right after I pushed reply, I actually went and looked... and the records WERE actually being pulled to the name servers, I just needed to run the cron script to pull them. Duh.

But it definitely does raise a question -- why? Why create possibly thousands of zone files instead of just keeping the records inside of the main zone record? It seems highly unnecessary. I can't see that it would speed up a name server to have to pull in thousands of records when a couple hundred would do.

Think about our situation with 100 domains per server times 10 servers. And if each domain has even 10 subdomains, we're talking 10,000 record files when 1,000 would do. What if we had 100 servers with 800 domains per server (standard in shared hosting)? Wow. 800,000 files that need to be updated possibly every hour... yikes.

This change just doesn't make sense to me.

 

[Chris Hunter]

I'm seeing something else that I'm not a fan of at all either... I migrated a website with a lot of subdomains -- hundreds of subdomains in fact - and now the /var/www/vhosts folder is completely cluttered with them as they were once under /var/www/vhosts/domain.com/subdomains/

Yikes. Who thought of that and thought that would be a good idea?

 

[Chris Hunter]

LOL - ok they more I look at 10.4.4 -- the more I HATE it. So the migration manager pulled over all subdomains and the main domain itself. It asigned apache.apache ownership to almost all of the subdomains... WTF?? Really??

I've been a loyal Plesk user and have paid three times what I would pay for cPanel since 2003. I've dealt with poor support (that you have to pay for) and poor migration paths for years. But this is turning into a nightmare to manage customers on. Geez.

What were the software engineers even thinking with this latest package update? I wish I had taken a snapshot before I upgraded from 10.3. It seemed a LOT more stable than this...