dns woes

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The initial diagnosis is that the SOA record for your domain is still pointing to the dns1.icann.org nameserver. This means one of two things: either the changing of the DNS record with the ISP did not go correctly, or enough time hasn't passed to update the glue .com servers.

When your DNS domain is hosted by servers that have names in that domain (DNS1.example.com, when the domain you want to host is example.com), the register has to register nameserver records in it's own glue database that permanently respond with the ip for DNS1.example.com. This is because the way DNS works, when a dns client looks up dns1.example.com to find the www.example.com record, it obviously has to find out the dns1.example.com address from somewhere besides your nameserver (see the circular loop here.) That's where the registrar's nameserver records come into play. By that I mean that you specifically tell your registrar to create a special server record (a - host record) that they host on the registration servers that says dns1.example.com is ip 192.0.0.2. Then everybody else uses that ip address to actually lookup every other bit of information about the zone that matters.

This is not a problem when your domain is hosted on somebody else's nameservers, because they have already done this. If you host other domains on your servers besides example.com, you will NOT need to redo this process, since the dns1.example.com name servers will be able to be resolved to get the information for your www.otherexample.com domain.

Lots of stuff here, but I hope that it helps!

Post edited by: WillSargent, at: 2008/02/27 07:23&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;Post edited by: WillSargent, at: 2008/02/27 07:25

&quot;&quot;I have a domain with a registrar, example.com. It resolved fine with an A record on the registrar's dns servers pointing to my fixed ip address. I want to offer clients two dns severs, dns1.example.com and dns2.example.com to use for mail and dns, etc. if they wanted it. I changed the dns from my registrar's servers to dns1.example.com and dns2.example.com which were set up in virtualmin pro. Now I can't get to www.example.com, hosts and dig produce errors, and whois is correct. What do you think is wrong?&quot;&quot;

This is getting more confusing. Are you saying that you have a domain &quot;example.com&quot; that worked and that the two nameserver designations you provided don't work. It sounds to me like you set up your nameservers as virtual servers on the same box while BIND is operating on your arbitrary hostname. Don't confuse virtual servers with base servers. For ease, if you will, your nameservers should be base servers on two separate boxes. I say should, as other posts have touched on the nastiness of trying to run two nameservers on the same box.

Or maybe I'm reading you wrong.

Hope that helps,
Dan

Hi,

You may need to check your IPs and make sure it actually is static and not simply assigned out of a dynamic IP pool. I called the actual box the base server ( your OS ) to differentiate from a virtual server. Unless I read wrong you can't run BIND as a virtual server.

In BIND you have to make sure you are actually running BIND as name based resolve. In your primary nameserver you should have a master zone set up for dns1.example.com and dns2.example.com and a master for example.com, something has to be the start of authority. Also, change your hostnames to dns1 and dns2, right now bind is running as server1 and server2 so where do you have dns1 and dns2?

Hope that helps,
Dan