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I'm in the process of moving some domains to a new hosting company which requires self management of domain names. It is on CentOS 5.5.

I have 3 domain names I simply wish to point to the box and will run Tomcat to serve the content according to domain.

Do I actually need to install a DNS server? I have seen this tutorial to create a domain server.

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4 Answers

up vote 3 down vote accepted

Where did you register your domains? With your previous hosting company, or with some other company? If your previous hosting company was providing DNS for your domains you'll either need to find another DNS service provider like EasyDNS (not an endorsement), or host DNS yourself. My personal recommendation would be to find a service provider to handle DNS for you, but if you want to roll your own, bind is overkill. Look into djbdns, a short guide is provided here

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Thanks Brent. I registered the domains as stand alone with fasthosts. They have an option to use their name servers and under advanced DNS it has options to specify "A Records", "CNAME Records", "MX Records", "TXT Records", "AAAA Records" - so I can use this instead of maintaining my own domain server? – Nick Sep 3 '10 at 16:38
Yes Nick, you can definitely do that and I would recommend it over handling running your own DNS server(s). – brent Sep 3 '10 at 17:09
Great, this seems to work fine. I didn't realise this was common for domain registrars to also offer their name servers as previously the hosting company has always suggested transferring it to them. Yes, I certainly didn't want to install and maintain a DNS server unnecessarily. Thanks. – Nick Sep 3 '10 at 19:39
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up vote 2 down vote

http://www.howtoforge.com/bind-installation-on-centos above link give step by step how to and if your looking use GUI you try install system-config-bind or http://studyhat.blogspot.com/2010/02/setting-dns-server-with-bind.html

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up vote 2 down vote

Like Brent said, your best bet is to go to see if your registrar provides DNS services, and find a 3rd party to host DNS for you if your registrar won't. If you do decide to host DNS yourself, you should know in addition to the setup, you'll need to register your name servers.

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up vote 2 down vote

Usually the easier is to

  • find out where the domains are hosted, with whois mydomain.com or use a search page on the Net

  • you need the login password to manage the domain name information

  • Usually you don't have to change the NS server for your domains (just below the TLD). For instance mydomain.com needs .com to be told where / who will take care of resolving the domain and its subdomains information (IP, mail server...).

  • But you have to enter the information for your domain and sub-domains: edit the DNS / Name server attributes, and add, for instance A fields

E.g

www    1.2.3.4
@      1.2.3.4

where 1.2.3.4 is the IP of the Web server, and @ is the IP for the domain itself (without www).

You shouldn't have to worry more about DNS.

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