www. isn't working!

Hello all,

I've been working on setting up my little Name Server, I'm on a Linux Box, running Red Hat 8, BIND (the later version, using .conf not .boot) and named.

I registered my IP address with the people I bought the domain name off, as the nameserver for that domain, and now it don't work!

by visiting www.deagdev.co.uk you get a "page cannot be displayed" error. By doing "dig deagdev.co.uk" I get a SERVFAIL and by doing "dig +trace deagdev.co.uk" I get:

deagdev.co.uk 172800 IN NS ns.deagdev.co.uk

: from NIC.uk.

However I get nothing returned from ns.deagdev.co.uk.


the output for "dig +trace ns.deagdev.co.uk" is as follows:

ns.deagdev.co.uk. 172800 IN A 217.199.164.171
deagdev.co.uk. 172800 IN NS ns.deagdev.co.uk.
deagdev.co.uk. 172800 IN NS ns2.deagdev.co.uk.

: from NIC.uk.

I think I have got myself in a bit of a pickle with regard to my name server actually controlling itself.

Does the above output indicate that ns.mydomain.co.uk controls the domain name deagdev.co.uk?

I suppose it is possible that I have gone too far in registering my server IP address with my domain name people.

Obvoiusly what I would like is at least an A record returned for "dig +trace www.deagdev.co.uk", but I'm not getting this, I just get nothing.

I have had a look around the internet for some help for this and the only thing I could find is possibly that the name server is querying itself and is failing for that reason, but I don't really understand what that means.

The mystery of DNS is the most confounding thing I've ever come across in my 6 years of being an web developer and the standard help and documentation for DNS stuff seems to assume a level of knowledge that far supasses my meager learning.

Any help/advice/comments will be so greatly appreciated that I'm willing to offer my firstborn in exchange.

In advance, Thank you very much for your help.

Paul

yeah well, fortunately, what you may consider the burmuda triangle (DNS), I like to consider my playground. So... *rubs hands together briskly* let's see what we've got here.

First of all, I want to make it clear that registering your IP address is a good thing. This way you can have direct control over your reverse lookup zone resolution. I liiiiike control. :-D

First step, the normal resolution process reaches your DNS server which is good as demonstrated below. Notice it also successfully resolved the WWW host.

http://serialcoders.sytes.net/cgi-b...&lr=3&submit=DS

A zone transfer is successful as well:

http://serialcoders.sytes.net/cgi-b...=AXFR&submit=DS

I see in the zone transfer you do NOT have an 'A' record specified for the root domain. tsk tsk. Everything else needs to be gravy. Now let's check out that reverse lookup starting with a resolver server to see if your registered IP is taking effect:

http://serialcoders.sytes.net/cgi-b...bmit=Reverse+IP

Well look at that. It works! ...I think. Totally different zone there, but it's similar. If ever you have problems with mail coming from your server being rejected for spam reasons, experiment by adding a second PTR record for the mail host. Or just replace the current one. I really oughta look at some references to see if multiple PTR records for a single IP is valid.

Now to attempt to do some lookups that produced a SERVFAIL in dig. Looking for the non-existant 'A' record for the root domain:

http://serialcoders.sytes.net/cgi-b...ype=A&submit=DS

Seems we got a perfectly healthy response indicating no 'A' records exist for that domain. I have no clue what TRACE does. Let's see a type ANY query to see if that produces the SERVFAIL:

http://serialcoders.sytes.net/cgi-b...e=ANY&submit=DS

Welp, you're looking ship shape there bud. Perhaps you fixed your problem and didn't let us know. :-(

Mr. Rage,

Thank you so much for your reply, just before the end of my day over here in sunny London, I discovered the wonders of error logs!

It turns out there was an "unexpected end of input" error with one of my zone files, I still managed to spend a good hour trying to find out what the problem was, and in the end started from scratch with it and as you've found out, it only bloomin' well works!

In my joy and delight I must have forgotten my manners and I do apologise for not letting you know it was fixed.

The next trick up my leaners sleeve is to try and sort out sub-domains for that URL, I notice you mention something about a root domain, would that allow me to use the VirtualHosts stuff in my apache config file?

Also is the root domain thing like a wildcard record?

* IN A 217.199.164.171


Thanks again,

Paul

Well, if you only host 1 website, you don't need to mess with virtual hosts. That one website will be used no matter what domain a person is using to reach you.

My point with my comment is as follows:

This works
http://www.deagdev.co.uk/

This does not
http://deagdev.co.uk/

So you need to add an 'A' record for the root domain. See what I'm saying? In addition, you showed me a wildcard. That is so that anything.deagdev.co.uk will point to the IP address you gave in your example. however, I was thinking something like this:

@ IN A 217.199.164.171

@ is a placeholder for the root domain (e.g. deagdev.co.uk).

thanks again mate, your a star!