create name server/set up dns

I answered this same question via email, but I'll copy/paste here, as it seems to be a particularly confusing aspect of DNS for many people.

These steps are only moderately specific to GoDaddy...though some registrars will let you enter both a name and IP, and they'll trust that those details are sane, which makes bootstrapping a new name server much less time consuming. The good news is that once you have bootstrapped a name server into existence you never have to do it again for that server.

So, here goes:

You don't do anything in Virtualmin for the first set of name servers. GoDaddy won't let you spring a nameserver into existence that doesn't already have a hostname pointing to it. You need a zone that you control, and already has name service (that you also control), in order to create two new name server records that point to your Virtualmin server. Your Virtualmin server does not need to know about these names at all (and it won't do any good for it to know about them, because GoDaddy won't let you enter an IP and bootstrap a server into existence...some registrars will trust that the names/IPs you're entering will resolve correctly, but GoDaddy is not one of them).

You can use any number of free DNS hosting services (including GoDaddy itself) to setup those first name servers on some zone that you control. You can't use your Virtualmin server as a name server until it already has a name that resolves.

So, login to GoDaddy, go to the Domain Control Center.

Click on one of your zones that has name service provided by GoDaddy servers (this is the default when you first buy a domain at GoDaddy). It doesn't matter if this is the zone you want to be the "permanent" name server hosting zone. This is just temporary until you have made your Virtualmin server exist for GoDaddy.

Find the section labeled "Hosts" at the bottom of the page, and click "Add".

Fill in "ns1" in the hostname. Fill in the first IP address of your Virtualmin server in the Host IP 1 field.

Click OK.

Click Add again in the Hosts section.

Fill in "ns2" in the hostname. Fill in the second IP address of your Virtualmin server.

Click OK.

Now (or a few hours from now, when the GoDaddy server reloads its zone files), you can make use of your Virtualmin server. For your next zone, you're going to change the name servers to ns1.domain.tld (whatever zone you used in the steps above) and ns2.domain.tld. Once that zone is up and running you can actually move all name hosting (including the zone you used in the bootstrap step above) to your Virtualmin server.

(I consider this the single most irritating thing about GoDaddy.)

Once all of that's done, you may want to fiddle with the kinds of NS records Virtualmin produces, and you may want to setup a DNS slave.

The BIND sections of the Webmin documentation might be worth reading up on:

http://doxfer.webmin.com/Webmin/BINDDNSServer

http://doxfer.webmin.com/Webmin/BINDTroubleshootingTools

But you don't actually need to do anything to setup zones in Virtualmin. I'm just including this as "recommended reading" if you still aren't sure what the heck I'm talking about.

You will need to add a secondary NS record to your Virtualmin Server Templates, IF you are not running a slave DNS server.

Browse to the Server Templates that you use, and in the BIND DNS domain section, add:

${DOM} IN NS ns2.domain.tld

Where domain.tld is replaced with whatever domain you plan to use for your name server zone. (Usually your primary company domain. For example, we use ns1.virtualmin.com and ns2.virtualmin.com for all of our various zones.)

And, you may also need to explicitly set the first name server, if the hostname of your server is not the name you want to serve out as the other NS record. That can be set in the "Master DNS server hostname" field. Set it to ns1.domain.tld.

DNS can be very intimidating, until you really grasp what it's doing and how it works, but it's actually a pretty simple bunch of concepts.

Just remember:

• The registrar (GoDaddy) tells the world how to find your name server
• Your name server tells the world how to find your host addresses.

You need both for anything to work. Virtualmin can only handle the host addresses. It can't do anything about GoDaddy and those glue records. (Our domain registration plugin might actually handle some of that, but it doesn't support GoDaddy yet.)

I answered this same question via email, but I'll copy/paste here, as it seems to be a particularly confusing aspect of DNS for many people.

These steps are only moderately specific to GoDaddy...though some registrars will let you enter both a name and IP, and they'll trust that those details are sane, which makes bootstrapping a new name server much less time consuming. The good news is that once you have bootstrapped a name server into existence you never have to do it again for that server.

So, here goes:

You don't do anything in Virtualmin for the first set of name servers. GoDaddy won't let you spring a nameserver into existence that doesn't already have a hostname pointing to it. You need a zone that you control, and already has name service (that you also control), in order to create two new name server records that point to your Virtualmin server. Your Virtualmin server does not need to know about these names at all (and it won't do any good for it to know about them, because GoDaddy won't let you enter an IP and bootstrap a server into existence...some registrars will trust that the names/IPs you're entering will resolve correctly, but GoDaddy is not one of them).

You can use any number of free DNS hosting services (including GoDaddy itself) to setup those first name servers on some zone that you control. You can't use your Virtualmin server as a name server until it already has a name that resolves.

So, login to GoDaddy, go to the Domain Control Center.

Click on one of your zones that has name service provided by GoDaddy servers (this is the default when you first buy a domain at GoDaddy). It doesn't matter if this is the zone you want to be the "permanent" name server hosting zone. This is just temporary until you have made your Virtualmin server exist for GoDaddy.

Find the section labeled "Hosts" at the bottom of the page, and click "Add".

Fill in "ns1" in the hostname.
Fill in the first IP address of your Virtualmin server in the Host IP 1 field.

Click OK.

Click Add again in the Hosts section.

Fill in "ns2" in the hostname.
Fill in the second IP address of your Virtualmin server.

Click OK.

Now (or a few hours from now, when the GoDaddy server reloads its zone files), you can make use of your Virtualmin server. For your next zone, you're going to change the name servers to ns1.domain.tld (whatever zone you used in the steps above) and ns2.domain.tld. Once that zone is up and running you can actually move all name hosting (including the zone you used in the bootstrap step above) to your Virtualmin server.

(I consider this the single most irritating thing about GoDaddy.)

Once all of that's done, you may want to fiddle with the kinds of NS records Virtualmin produces, and you may want to setup a DNS slave.

The BIND sections of the Webmin documentation might be worth reading up on:

http://doxfer.com/Webmin/BINDDNSServer

http://doxfer.com/Webmin/BINDTroubleshootingTools

But you don't actually need to do anything to setup zones in Virtualmin. I'm just including this as "recommended reading" if you still aren't sure what the heck I'm talking about.

You will need to add a secondary NS record to your Virtualmin Server Templates, IF you are not running a slave DNS server.

Browse to the Server Templates that you use, and in the BIND DNS domain section, add:

${DOM} IN NS ns2.domain.tld

Where domain.tld is replaced with whatever domain you plan to use for your name server zone. (Usually your primary company domain. For example, we use ns1.virtualmin.com and ns2.virtualmin.com for all of our various zones.)

And, you may also need to explicitly set the first name server, if the hostname of your server is not the name you want to serve out as the other NS record. That can be set in the "Master DNS server hostname" field. Set it to ns1.domain.tld.

DNS can be very intimidating, until you really grasp what it's doing and how it works, but it's actually a pretty simple bunch of concepts.

Just remember:

* The registrar (GoDaddy) tells the world how to find your name server
* Your name server tells the world how to find your host addresses.

You need both for anything to work. Virtualmin can only handle the host addresses. It can't do anything about GoDaddy and those glue records. (Our domain registration plugin might actually handle some of that, but it doesn't support GoDaddy yet.)

Hello,

I'm migrating from CPanel to Virtualmin and DNS is one of the rough spots I'm having with the change.

Although I followed Joe's directions above and they worked great, I'm still uncertain how to add the name server IP's to the server.

For example, in CPanel, there is a page where I assign my IP to the name server. This is the same IP that I use in godaddy (for example) to point to the name server.

The question is, how do I add the IPs I'm going to use for ns2.domain.tld and ns3.domain.tld to webmin/virtualmin?

I answered this same question via email, but I'll copy/paste here, as it seems to be a particularly confusing aspect of DNS for many people.

These steps are only moderately specific to GoDaddy...though some registrars will let you enter both a name and IP, and they'll trust that those details are sane, which makes bootstrapping a new name server much less time consuming. The good news is that once you have bootstrapped a name server into existence you never have to do it again for that server.

So, here goes:

You don't do anything in Virtualmin for the first set of name servers. GoDaddy won't let you spring a nameserver into existence that doesn't already have a hostname pointing to it. You need a zone that you control, and already has name service (that you also control), in order to create two new name server records that point to your Virtualmin server. Your Virtualmin server does not need to know about these names at all (and it won't do any good for it to know about them, because GoDaddy won't let you enter an IP and bootstrap a server into existence...some registrars will trust that the names/IPs you're entering will resolve correctly, but GoDaddy is not one of them).

You can use any number of free DNS hosting services (including GoDaddy itself) to setup those first name servers on some zone that you control. You can't use your Virtualmin server as a name server until it already has a name that resolves.

So, login to GoDaddy, go to the Domain Control Center.

Click on one of your zones that has name service provided by GoDaddy servers (this is the default when you first buy a domain at GoDaddy). It doesn't matter if this is the zone you want to be the "permanent" name server hosting zone. This is just temporary until you have made your Virtualmin server exist for GoDaddy.

Find the section labeled "Hosts" at the bottom of the page, and click "Add".

Fill in "ns1" in the hostname.
Fill in the first IP address of your Virtualmin server in the Host IP 1 field.

Click OK.

Click Add again in the Hosts section.

Fill in "ns2" in the hostname.
Fill in the second IP address of your Virtualmin server.

Click OK.

Now (or a few hours from now, when the GoDaddy server reloads its zone files), you can make use of your Virtualmin server. For your next zone, you're going to change the name servers to ns1.domain.tld (whatever zone you used in the steps above) and ns2.domain.tld. Once that zone is up and running you can actually move all name hosting (including the zone you used in the bootstrap step above) to your Virtualmin server.

(I consider this the single most irritating thing about GoDaddy.)

Once all of that's done, you may want to fiddle with the kinds of NS records Virtualmin produces, and you may want to setup a DNS slave.

The BIND sections of the Webmin documentation might be worth reading up on:

http://doxfer.com/Webmin/BINDDNSServer

http://doxfer.com/Webmin/BINDTroubleshootingTools

But you don't actually need to do anything to setup zones in Virtualmin. I'm just including this as "recommended reading" if you still aren't sure what the heck I'm talking about.

You will need to add a secondary NS record to your Virtualmin Server Templates, IF you are not running a slave DNS server.

Browse to the Server Templates that you use, and in the BIND DNS domain section, add:

${DOM} IN NS ns2.domain.tld

Where domain.tld is replaced with whatever domain you plan to use for your name server zone. (Usually your primary company domain. For example, we use ns1.virtualmin.com and ns2.virtualmin.com for all of our various zones.)

And, you may also need to explicitly set the first name server, if the hostname of your server is not the name you want to serve out as the other NS record. That can be set in the "Master DNS server hostname" field. Set it to ns1.domain.tld.

DNS can be very intimidating, until you really grasp what it's doing and how it works, but it's actually a pretty simple bunch of concepts.

Just remember:

* The registrar (GoDaddy) tells the world how to find your name server
* Your name server tells the world how to find your host addresses.

You need both for anything to work. Virtualmin can only handle the host addresses. It can't do anything about GoDaddy and those glue records. (Our domain registration plugin might actually handle some of that, but it doesn't support GoDaddy yet.)

Any help is truly appreciated!

Thanks in advance.

I answered this same question via email, but I'll copy/paste here, as it seems to be a particularly confusing aspect of DNS for many people.

These steps are only moderately specific to GoDaddy...though some registrars will let you enter both a name and IP, and they'll trust that those details are sane, which makes bootstrapping a new name server much less time consuming. The good news is that once you have bootstrapped a name server into existence you never have to do it again for that server.

So, here goes:

You don't do anything in Virtualmin for the first set of name servers. GoDaddy won't let you spring a nameserver into existence that doesn't already have a hostname pointing to it. You need a zone that you control, and already has name service (that you also control), in order to create two new name server records that point to your Virtualmin server. Your Virtualmin server does not need to know about these names at all (and it won't do any good for it to know about them, because GoDaddy won't let you enter an IP and bootstrap a server into existence...some registrars will trust that the names/IPs you're entering will resolve correctly, but GoDaddy is not one of them).

You can use any number of free DNS hosting services (including GoDaddy itself) to setup those first name servers on some zone that you control. You can't use your Virtualmin server as a name server until it already has a name that resolves.

So, login to GoDaddy, go to the Domain Control Center.

Click on one of your zones that has name service provided by GoDaddy servers (this is the default when you first buy a domain at GoDaddy). It doesn't matter if this is the zone you want to be the "permanent" name server hosting zone. This is just temporary until you have made your Virtualmin server exist for GoDaddy.

Find the section labeled "Hosts" at the bottom of the page, and click "Add".

Fill in "ns1" in the hostname.
Fill in the first IP address of your Virtualmin server in the Host IP 1 field.

Click OK.

Click Add again in the Hosts section.

Fill in "ns2" in the hostname.
Fill in the second IP address of your Virtualmin server.

Click OK.

Now (or a few hours from now, when the GoDaddy server reloads its zone files), you can make use of your Virtualmin server. For your next zone, you're going to change the name servers to ns1.domain.tld (whatever zone you used in the steps above) and ns2.domain.tld. Once that zone is up and running you can actually move all name hosting (including the zone you used in the bootstrap step above) to your Virtualmin server.

(I consider this the single most irritating thing about GoDaddy.)

Once all of that's done, you may want to fiddle with the kinds of NS records Virtualmin produces, and you may want to setup a DNS slave.

The BIND sections of the Webmin documentation might be worth reading up on:

http://doxfer.com/Webmin/BINDDNSServer

http://doxfer.com/Webmin/BINDTroubleshootingTools

But you don't actually need to do anything to setup zones in Virtualmin. I'm just including this as "recommended reading" if you still aren't sure what the heck I'm talking about.

You will need to add a secondary NS record to your Virtualmin Server Templates, IF you are not running a slave DNS server.

Browse to the Server Templates that you use, and in the BIND DNS domain section, add:

${DOM} IN NS ns2.domain.tld

Where domain.tld is replaced with whatever domain you plan to use for your name server zone. (Usually your primary company domain. For example, we use ns1.virtualmin.com and ns2.virtualmin.com for all of our various zones.)

And, you may also need to explicitly set the first name server, if the hostname of your server is not the name you want to serve out as the other NS record. That can be set in the "Master DNS server hostname" field. Set it to ns1.domain.tld.

DNS can be very intimidating, until you really grasp what it's doing and how it works, but it's actually a pretty simple bunch of concepts.

Just remember:

* The registrar (GoDaddy) tells the world how to find your name server
* Your name server tells the world how to find your host addresses.

You need both for anything to work. Virtualmin can only handle the host addresses. It can't do anything about GoDaddy and those glue records. (Our domain registration plugin might actually handle some of that, but it doesn't support GoDaddy yet.)

you can add the IP by creating a virtual interface under the main IP.
eth0 is the main
eth0:1 is the virtual
eth0:2 is a virtual you can then use for ns3

you do this in the networking module-Network Configuration-Network Interfaces-click on eth0 and click add virtual interface