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DNS secondary server for external domain and DNS lookup fails

srvadm

Basic Pleskian
Dedicated server
CentOS 6, Parallels Plesk Panel 11.0.9 (64 bit)
ISP: 1&1

Problem 1 (Solved): Google and other mail providers were classifying as spam, messages sent from mydomain.com using PHP scripts
Solution 1: Install OpenDKIM 2.8.4

Problem 2 (Solved): The 1&1 Control Panel doesn't allow to config the TXT records required by OpenDKIM, in their DNS servers
Solution 2: Config the server as a primary name server for mydomain.com DNS zone

Problem 3: 1&1 DNS server can not be used as secondary server because mydomain.com is an external domain, i.e., 1&1 it's not the registrar
Solution 3:
Any bloodless solution aside from transferring mydomain.com to 1&1?

Problem 4: Since steps 1-2, we've detected occasional DNS lookup fails leading to "This webpage is not available". Specially when trying to access using the www subdomain despite there's a Canonical Name record: www.mydomain.com. CNAME mydomain.com.
Solution 4:
At first I thought the source of the problem is the dummy secondary DNS server being accessed instead of the primary one. But now I'm not sure after I found this messages in /var/log/messages:

Apr 3 22:55:08 s62591307 named[4731]: received SIGHUP signal to reload zones
Apr 3 22:55:08 s62591307 named[4731]: loading configuration from '/etc/named.conf'
Apr 3 22:55:08 s62591307 named[4731]: using default UDP/IPv4 port range: [1024, 65535]
Apr 3 22:55:08 s62591307 named[4731]: using default UDP/IPv6 port range: [1024, 65535]
Apr 3 22:55:08 s62591307 named[4731]: sizing zone task pool based on 4 zones
Apr 3 22:55:08 s62591307 named[4731]: Warning: 'empty-zones-enable/disable-empty-zone' not set: disabling RFC 1918 empty zones
Apr 3 22:55:08 s62591307 named[4731]: zone cuentosdeviejos.com/IN: (master) removed
Apr 3 22:55:08 s62591307 named[4731]: reloading configuration succeeded
Apr 3 22:55:08 s62591307 named[4731]: reloading zones succeeded

Any help would be appreciated
 
Last edited:
If the DNS management facilities provided by 1and1 aren't very good, the simplest solution is to use your Plesk box as both primary and secondary.

This is not really recommended because if your Plesk box goes down, there will be nothing to provide DNS lookups on the domains that are hosted on it. On the other hand, since your Plesk box is down, even if the DNS lookups worked, there would be nothing to answer any external requests.

Now some people feel that when DNS is totally down mail may bounce (as opposed to being tried again), and Google etc may not like getting no response from anything when crawling, but since the plesk box is unlikely to be down for long and not every often, it is a small risk.

Nevertheless, the best solution is to have a "real" secondary DNS server. You can do this very easily and very cheaply. For example you could rent a 1and1 low-end VPS and follow http://devblog.plesk.com/2013/10/slave-dns-and-plesk/

Or sign up with one of the many companies offering primary/secondary DNS facilities, which can be extremely inexpensive.
 
I agree having both servers in the same box is not a good idea. I'll check 1&1 and companies offering DNS services to decide

Thank you for your time
 
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