Private nameservers

[OneApplications]

Andy,

I'm only a novice when it comes to DNS but from what I understand you need to do the following. And I could well be wrong!!

1. ns1 & ns2.sound-designs.co.uk have to be set as nameservers on your VPS control panel. The VPS with interhost I mean. The way you do this varies depending on what control panel you are using. In CPanel for example there is a separate section for specifying your personal nameservers and assigning them an IP address (you'll need a separate IP address for each nameserver).

2. Once your interhost VPS is setup with your personal nameserver(s) you need to register these new nameservers with the registrar of sound-designs.co.uk (whoever that is??). They will need to know the IP addresses of your two nameservers and their names. Again, the method of doing this varies depending on the registrar.

3. You now need to set the nameservers for your other domains to ns1 & ns2.sound-designs.co.uk (which I think you've already done by the sounds of it).

So... When an internet query is made for pedaluk.co.uk the DNS network knows that it needs to query ns1.sound-designs.co.uk to get the IP address of pedaluk.co.uk. But before it can do that it needs to know what the IP address of ns1.sound-designs.co.uk is. That's where step 2 came in. The IP address of ns1 is held by the registrar of sound-designs.co.uk and so the nameserver can now be found.

This is where my understanding really gets a bit vague because I only have one VPS so the nameservers and all associated domains are running on the same physical server. In your case the VPS that's running your nameserver isn't hosting the site. I would assume that you need to add the pedaluk.co.uk domain to your interhost VPS but then set it's DNS zone to point pedaluk.co.uk to the IP address of your EUK VPS. So you'd simply have an A record of pedaluk.co.uk. A xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx.

So the query would then be directed to your EUK VPS. On the EUK VPS you would also have the pedaluk.co.uk domain setup but obviously on there it would have physical hosting.

Before you rush into following this babble Andy just wait for someone to confirm that this is in fact 100% correct. Like I say I'm just a novice and I wouldn't like to give you incorrect information!!

Good luck!

[eUKhost.com]

You are 100% correct

DNS is really complicated and I'm glad that you got better understanding of DNS. I cann further make it complicated by adding many more things, but you have kept it very simple and hopefully Andy will understand DNS in better way from your post.

[AndySV1K]

Thanks very much for your reply, it does indeed make much sense. sometimes it takes a simple answer to help a simple mind!

From what you are saying then, there IS a relationship between the nameservers and the domain of the same name.

I think my first step is to go to my EUK VPS and check A records for pedaluk.co.uk and 211209.co.uk.

Im not sure i want to get into changing all the nameserver info at the current VPS as im trying to leave them ASAP to get everything across to here. I was hoping to get it all working on a domain that is spare, so i know all is well then just shift everything across. but from what you are saying this may not be possible. I might have to bite the bullet, move it across and accept it could be down for a few days while i sort it out.

Im going to re-study all of this thread along with the other DNS website's ive been reading and re-check everything ive done.

I will update this thread again when a) it all works b) i get a 'lightbulb moment' or c) it all fails and my walls can withstand no more impacts from my head.

Andy.

[eUKhost.com]

Hello Andy,

It is possible. You can host any number of nameservers on a single VPS / Dedicated Server. All you need to do is add A records of those nameservers from your WHM ( VPS ) and register those nameservers from 123-reg control panel ( Manage DNS ). Once you register those then click on "Change Nameservers" in your 123-reg control panel and point your domain to your newly registered private nameservers.

I said, I don't want to make it complicated for you, but everything is possible if you understand DNS in better way. We offer private nameservers for all our resellers and each server hosts over 100 resellers. All resellers use same IPs to setup their private nameservers.

[OneApplications]

Hi Andy,

I'm glad my reply help you!!

You might not be aware of this, and I only found it out yesterday but if you want to setup a web site hosting on your new VPS and get it all up and running before pointing the DNS to it just do the following:-

1. Add the new domain to your new VPS.
2. Setup all it's hosting settings / limits / ftp users etc.
3. Copy all the files accross using ftp (or the CPanel file manager).
4. Setup any databases you need.

Ok, so how do we now test that the web site hosting is actually running from "the outside world"? Simple, just type: http://hosted_ip_address/~account_username/

For example if your domain was sound-designs.co.uk, the username for that account was sounds and the domain was hosted on ip 11.22.33.44 you'd type:-

http://11.22.33.44/~sounds/ Hey presto! sound-designs.co.uk should be displayed.

You can now use this address to fully check the functionality of the web site hosting before you set the DNS to point to the new VPS. Oh, I should point out that this probably only works if your new VPS is using CPanel although I'm sure there's a similar way of doing it on Plesk.

Hope this helps!

[OneApplications]

Just to add to this Andy...

If your end goal is to move away from interhost and host all of your sites on EUK then you need to forget about setting up nameservers on the interhost VPS (because you're going to ditch it anyway!)

I'm assuming you've probably only got the one domain that you're really bothered about and that's sound-designs.co.uk. Ok, if I were you at this stage I'd do the following:-

1. Setup sound-designs.co.uk as I have explained in the post above on the new EUK VPS.
2. When you are sure that the web site hosting is running correctly and you are ready to change over setup two new "personal nameservers" on the EUK VPS. I call them personal nameservers just because they are running on YOUR VPS and not some other server somewhere.
3. Now we need to register these nameservers with the DNS network. To do this you need to go to the sound-designs.co.uk control panel (at the registrar). The method for registering these nameservers varies depending on the registrar so if you let us know who that is we can give you some more help on that (I'm assuming it's not 123 in this case??).

4. Once the new nameservers are registered you can simply change the nameservers for sound-designs.co.uk itself to point to ns1 and ns2.sound-designs.co.uk.

If the registrar IS reg-123.co.uk step four is actually done as part of the nameserver registration in step 3 but I'll explain that in more detail once you let us know who the reg is for the domain.

My fingers hurt!!

[AndySV1K]

Thats brilliant, thank you again!

I have just initiated a domain transfer of sound-designs.co.uk over to 123reg. Once there i can happily play around with it and if all goes wrong, just point it back to the existing nameservers.

At the current domain host there is no facility at all to alter DNS settings. There is on the old VPS but not much use if i cant alter the domains.

With a bit of luck this will solve the problem once the domain has moved across. I will get on to FTP'ing the web site hosting to the new VPS later on tonight.

Andy.

[OneApplications]

Great stuff!

I'll give you a quick run through of how to register your nameservers with 123 because that's who I use for my domain registrar. I'd imagine that you've instructed 123 to keep your existing dns6.com nameservers for the time being?? This should ensure that your web site hosting still works as it does now.

Anyway once you have the web site hosting files copied over to EUK and you have a working version on the new VPS all you need to do is setup your personal nameservers in CPanel (as I mentioned before) and then you're ready to update the 123 control panel with YOUR nameservers as follows:-

1. In the domain control panel click on the Change Nameservers link.
2. Enter ns1.sound-designs.co.uk and ns2.sound-designs.co.uk into the first two nameserver textboxes.

The thing to note here is that because the domain name of the nameservers you have just entered is the same as YOUR domain, 123 knows that these are YOUR personal nameservers. It therefore has to know the IP addresses of the two nameservers so that any internet query for ns1.sound-designs.co.uk or ns2.sound-designs.co.uk will resolve to your VPS.

You will be prompted to enter the IP addresses and in theory that's it!! All done!

Now any query for sound-designs.co.uk will need to query ns1.sound-designs.co.uk. The IP address of this nameserver is held by 123-reg so the lookup now knows to head on over to your VPS to find the nameserver. Once there your nameserver service (called BIND) says "yes the IP address of sound-designs.co.uk is xx.yy.zz.xx. Obviously in this case the IP address of your web site hosting will be the same as the IP of the ns1 nameserver but that's not important. The query will now know the IP address of your website and SHOULD be able to find it!

Let us know how you get on...

[AndySV1K]

Ok, ive had some success.

I bit the bullet and transferred sound-designs.co.uk to 123reg. Set the nameservers and DNS to the new VPS. hey presto a few hours later it works.

I did have a few hickups after though, my VPS went down twice yesterday evening, i dont think it was anything to do with the changes made. According to the support chap it was mounted (he explained this as being heavy server loads or a process thats hangs) Cant see it as server loading as one web site hosting of just a few html pages, no email etc setup on a VPS shouldnt exactly make it sweat!

But anyway, its back up now and seems to be ok, ive now set up some of the mail addresses and also uploaded a few test pages for another domain.

The only concern now, is that a intodns.com report suggests that there is no reverse DNS. Although looking at the VPS there are PTR records set and all looks to be ok. I have sent a couple of test mails and they got through ok, but they were just to my other mails accounts. Do i need to worry about sorting this RDNS issue out or just ignore it?

Andy

P.S i really appreciate the help given here, im more than happy to write this all up from my perspective and log all the changes and settings i made if you consider it will help anyone else?

[OneApplications]

Hi Andy,

Glad you've had some success!

The RDNS needs to be setup by EUK because they own the IP address. As far as I understand it the PTR records on the VPS zones don't have any effect.

Just open a ticket with support and they will be able to sort this for you...

[AndySV1K]

Ahh ok. Will do that.

Atleast im making progress, a few days ago, if someone had said anything about RDNS or PTR my reply would have been... what? PT what? DNS who?




Andy.

[OneApplications]

No probs.

Your next problem will probably be sending to Hotmail accounts. I'm still struggling to get my emails to certain email providers. SPF records, domain keys... the list goes on!

I love computers, that's what I keep telling myself!