BIND/Named DNS zone file: Cannot access website without using www

Question

For our small business network, we host our own internal DNS (Named/Bind) server. However, our corporate website is hosted externally by GoDaddy.

We are able to access our external website if we use http://www.ourcompany.com. But if we try it without the www http://ourcompany.com, the browser cannot resolve the address. Also I notice that at the command prompt, we can successfully ping www.ourcompany.com but not ourcompany.com. These problems only appear to be an issue from within our corporate network.

Anyways, here is part of our named zone file:

$ORIGIN ourcompany.com.

ourcompany.com    IN A        173.201.XXX.XXX
www               IN A        173.201.XXX.XXX
server1           IN A        192.168.0.10
server2           IN A        192.168.0.11
serverA           IN CNAME    server1.ourcompany.com.
serverB           IN CNAME    server2.ourcompany.com.

etc...

(note: 173.201.XXX.XXX is the GoDaddy address our website is hosted at)

So what am I doing wrong with the DNS configuration here? Do I need to post my named.conf?

Also, is there any way to have DNS log all DNS requests so that I can look at the log and see exactly what zone config/zone file is being used when someone makes a request?

Answer 1

You forget a dot at the end of the name ourcompany.com. In fact, here, you create an address ourcompany.com.ourcompany.com, with the ORIGIN tag

Answer 2

Try putting a dot on the end of ourcompany.com in the following line:

ourcompany.com    IN A        173.201.XXX.XXX

i.e. make it:

ourcompany.com.    IN A        173.201.XXX.XXX

Or change

ourcompany.com    IN A        173.201.XXX.XXX

to

          IN A        173.201.XXX.XXX

I think that with your current config ourcompany.com.ourcompany.com would work.

The reason is that the the names you specify in the A and CNAME records are appended with the domain/name defined in the ORIGIN, i.e. they are relative to the ORIGIN, unless you make them fully qualified domain names.

Putting a . on the end of ourcompany.com makes it fully qualified.