What's my nameserver? [closed]

Question

I'm trying to set up a domain for my site, which is hosted on a virtual server, behind a low-end belkin home router. I have set up the port fording and set the A record but hover is asking for a name server. Entering my IP gives me this:

All I know about setting up a name server is that I have seen the option "DNS Server" when setting up my ubuntu server. What do I do? Please help.

Answer 1

When you are setting up Ubuntu the DNS servers that are being asked for are the upstream nameservers. These should be the IP addresses of the nameservers provided by your ISP. You may want to use Google's nameservers, or those provided by OpenDNS.

If you have a home router, you can usually use its IP address as a nameserver. Hosts that use DHCP to get their IP address usually get their DNS nameservers that way.

All domains have their own nameservers which host the names for that domain. Unless you understand DNS quite well, it is best to use the nameservers provided by your registrar for this purpose.

In your case with Hover, you want to use Hover's DNS servers. Add an A record for your domain with the external IP address of your router. Your router will then handle routing connections to the server using your port forwarding.

Answer 2

You need to either set up your own DNS server or find a service that will do it for you. Given the nature of your question, I'd say the latter is going to be easiest.

When you register a domain, you need to provide the registrar with the details of the DNS servers that DNS records for your domain will be served out of. Say you buy example.com. Any client on the internet that wants to resolve example.com to an IP address somehow needs to find your DNS server that hosts the records that point example.com to 1.1.1.1 (for example). DNS is heirarchical, so they first look up the root servers to find the nameservers that are authoritative for com. With this address, the client sends out another query to the com nameservers asking who is authoritative for example.com. This should point to a DNS server that will contain the actual IP address record for example.com.

I thought most registrars offer people the option of having their DNS records hosted there as well. If not, you'll have to find a separate DNS provider or build your own. Bear

Answer 3

You can figure out what name servers exists for your domain a couple of different ways. You can check WHOIS or DNSStuff (or any of the plethora of web sites available for checking DNS) to see what's listed as your name servers or you can run a tool like nslookup or dig to find the name servers for your domain. If you've not taken any steps to set up your name servers then chances are the registrar that you registered the domain name with is acting as your name servers, so start there.