Subdomains not always working? im lost...

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#1 Wed, 05/27/2009 - 05:20
CoronelN

Subdomains not always working? im lost...

Hello i have Vitualmin and Webmin running in a Debian 4 X64 enviroment.

and i am having a problem with the DNS (I think)

when i create a sub server (to me they are subdomains) it works in some occasion and in others the navigator says can resolve the address.

1 example is http:n.venez-rever.com:1666 or http://crnes.paintballaparis.com or http://drupal.paintballaparis.com

i am at loss here as i cant seem to find where it is falling, from some machines it resolves from others not...

the primary DNS . Bind server is on the same machone as paintballaparis.com and the secondary is dns.solventar.com.ve

they are not slave master config as i have no idea of how to do that, but if i understand DNS servers right it will losten to the primary always unless it is down in which case will look for the secondary... or i am wrong?

I tried creating the zone in the sec too just in case but the problem remains...

any help will be appreciated. a noob with hopes N

Wed, 05/27/2009 - 05:46
andreychek

Howdy,

You're right, it does look like you may be having some DNS issues :-)

Taking a page from Ronald's playbook, the intodns.com site can give some details on how your DNS is performing, and offers insights into what needs to be corrected.

So if you go to intodns.com, enter paintballaparis.com, you'll see a bunch of "red" marks indicating errors of some sort. You'll need to make all the red marks go away to have any chance of it working correctly :-)

As far as having multiple DNS servers go -- clients actually alternate between them. So any server listed as a nameserver for your domain has to be fully functional, or else things will go awry.
-Eric

Wed, 05/27/2009 - 06:19 (Reply to #2)
ronald
ronald's picture

yeah that page is great for its simplicity and easy to understand what needs to be fixed.

Going real deep you want to use http://www.squish.net/dnscheck/ as well.
you can check what's going on at the rootservers, check subdomains, Ip's and choose what it needs to check.
Then you can go further by checking the data that's coming from it. lol. takes a lot of time and understanding though (or use it to learn to understand dns).

Wed, 05/27/2009 - 08:03 (Reply to #3)
CoronelN

Thanks guys,

I will take a look at the page Andrey suggested as the one Ronald suggests i cant understand well... (i said it before i spent 14 years away from IT lol)

My problem is that i dont have acces to my secondary NS arghhh... so i cant pinpoint the problem that must be happening there...

paintballaparis.com is his own primary NS the other NS is a VPS a friend has but he has no idea on how to allow me create and mess with my zones w/o joepardizing his... i guess i can always install XEN and VPS my box to have a ns... argghh... this is too much for me lol... will revert for more advice!

utterly thankful

Nathaniel

Wed, 05/27/2009 - 09:18 (Reply to #4)
ronald
ronald's picture

if the other VPS has webmin then it would be easy.
Just add it to webmin servers on your machine and activate cluster slave server under BIND module.

Not sure if it would work without the VPS having webmin else he could add you as a user (with ssh access) and the add the user to the group bind/named.
Then your webmin could login to that VPS over a shell with that username and the rights to create slavezones automatically

Thu, 05/28/2009 - 21:01 (Reply to #5)
CoronelN

Ok guys it is confirmed the problem was not all zones were in both the primary and secondary NS

As i am a noob who tends to screw things up my friend owning the secondary NS do not wants me accessing his zones lol.

We will work out a solution in house (his server has Cpnael)
either i learn and he gives me access or he keeps creating the zones by hand upon my requests. :S

Now another question related to the zones:

when i create a sub domain (or a sub server in VM jergon) it creates a whole zone for the sub, when it will suffice to create a line in the zone file of the master... just wondering what is the philosophy behind this.

thanks!
N

Thu, 05/28/2009 - 21:16 (Reply to #6)
Joe
Joe's picture

<div class='quote'>when i create a sub domain (or a sub server in VM jergon) it creates a whole zone for the sub, when it will suffice to create a line in the zone file of the master... just wondering what is the philosophy behind this.</div>

There is a configuration option behind it. ;-)

Look at Server Templates-&gt;BIND DNS Domain-&gt;Add sub-domain DNS records to parent domain?

This historically didn't actually work for sub-servers, but that was a bug and it has been fixed relatively recently.

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Thu, 05/28/2009 - 21:20 (Reply to #7)
Joe
Joe's picture

Oh, and the reason behind it is that Virtualmin doesn't care about names. So a subdomain name is the same as a domain name to Virtualmin...and so, by default, it treats them identically. Each gets a zone file, etc. This has some benefits in terms of flexibility and the ability to delegate subdomain zone management to other users, and such.

There isn't really any good argument against it, as long as you're letting Webmin manage everything...but if you have to manually setup the slave zones, it does add some extra labor. So, in your case it'd be better to keep it as simple as possible.

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