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Apologies if the question title is nonsensical, but this has me quite confused.
Here’s what I want to do:

Domain xyz.com is the FQDN for webserver xyz-1.
xyz-1 has Plesk installed.

I want xyz-1 to be able to serve the DNS for xyz.com, so that the nameservers for xyz.com are set to ns1.xyz.com and ns2.xyz.com.

I’m probably wording this incorrectly, but that’s essentially what I’m trying to do.

Additionally, any domains added to Plesk, with their nameservers set to ns1 and ns2.xyz.com would also have their DNS served correctly (duh?).

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2 Answers

up vote 2 down vote accepted

From the notes on another answer I realize this has already been figured out, but I thought it would be a good idea to outline the process for future people looking for an answer:

  1. Register your domain (example.com)

  2. At the registrar, you will need to registrar your name servers with the names you want to use (ns1.example.com and ns2.example.com) along with the IP addresses of your DNS servers (preferably on different networks in different geographic locations)

  3. Set up your DNS servers at those IP addresses.

  4. Set up the DNS servers to serve authoratatively for your domain name(s).

  5. In your zone file, be sure to like ns1.example.com in the SOA record as the master name server.

  6. Ensure that you create NS records within the zone file using the same entries that you used at the registrar.

  7. Create A records for the hostnames used (ns1 and ns2) within the zone file for the domain.

  8. Take a vacation and hope you don't have to mess with it again. :)

If, in the future, you need to move a DNS server:

  1. Set up the DNS server at the new location.

  2. Change the A record entry with the new IP address.

  3. Update the name server registration at the registrar with the new IP address of the server.

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Thank you. I could have used this two days ago, so I’m glad this is hear for anyone else having the same issue. – abrahamvegh Dec 16 '10 at 14:52
Are there any ports besides 53 that would need to be open on the server in order for the DNS/nameserving function to work properly? – abrahamvegh Dec 16 '10 at 14:53
For incoming traffic port 53 is sufficient. On your secondary servers, by default they will use somewhat random ports for outgoing zone transfer requests, but there is an options statement for BIND which will force outgoing queries and transfer requests to a specific port if outgoing ports need to be locked down as well. – Justin Scott Dec 20 '10 at 14:23
1  
I'll also mention that DNS uses both UDP and TCP on port 53, so ensure that it's open for both protocols. – Justin Scott Dec 20 '10 at 14:23
up vote 0 down vote

when you registered the domain xyz.com you had to write some dns servers and their ip addresses. is xyz-1 part of those ?

if is not then you need to add it. the web server has nothing to do with the dns server - in your scenario looks like the same server has two functions - dns and web server with Plesk.

if it is you already are serving dns requests from that server.

the way you can check is simple - open a terminal and type:

host -t ns  xyz.com

look at the output and that is what is nameserver for that zone.

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Thanks, I figured out how to register the nameserver prefixes with my registrar and they’re propagating now. My issue was that I was ignorant of the registrar providing that functionality. – abrahamvegh Dec 15 '10 at 1:37
glad you fixed it. for the future be careful with negative cache poisoning - may affect you futures sites – silviud Dec 15 '10 at 18:31

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