DNS Problems and Solutions
So unfortunately I have been so busy it has been hard to post lately, however I am working to reprioritize so I will be able to post more often. The problem of the week up for discussion today is the DNS problems I have been experiencing today. A bit of background will help make this whole situation a little easier to understand. So my domain name had two listed name servers, one at my hosting company and the other living on my dedicated server at the hosting company. This was working okay, or so it seemed but it just really bothered me when my domain name didn’t pass the tests at DNSStuff.com . I have complete control over the DNS records living on my dedicated server. I can even create records for my public IP addresses that come into the building, which are different than my IP addresses at my hosting provider. The problem lies in the fact that I could only modify DNS records at my host for IP addresses that are owned by the hosting the company. The other problem here was that I had no way to control which name server was the primary, which serial number is correct, or which name server is authoritative.So what is the solution to this problem you ask? Well for starters I brought up another Linux box hosted locally in my own data center. After this I installed Bind 9 and configured it to host the master records for my domain and my reverse IP zones. To set this up I followed the steps over at HowToForge.com. This tutorial is very good and goes into just the right amount of detail to get everything up and running once Bind is installed. Once all the setup was finished on my primary server I setup the secondary server, this is my dedicated server at my hosting company. The secondary server is running the Plesk Control Panel, so I went in and switched the DNS settings for the domain in Plesk to be secondary. This worked initially but the file quit receiving zone updates from the master. So what I ended up doing was modifying the named.conf of the secondary server following the instructions at the aforementioned tutorial. I made the zone file have a new name in the named.conf such as “bak.domain.com”. Once this was finished and I restarted the Bind service the zone was updated successfully from the master. So granted this is a fairly simple task it is one that has been really bothering me for a while and now I am able to pass all the tests except one at dnsstuff.com. (Btw, the failing test is Single Point of Failure, I get a warning, but word on the forums is that this test is broken)