Centos – Failed to add custom DNS Server

bindcentosdomain-name-system

My company wants me to setup our own DNS Servers, but i'm running into problem with it. So here's the story:

We bought a domain example.com from marcaria and bought a new VPS located in Russia. Our goal is to setup example.com to use ns1.example.com and ns2.example.com. But we cant do that because our domain still pointing to marcaria NS.

So first i create DNS Server using BIND within our VPS with this tutorial http://linuxgravity.com/configuring-bind9-domain-name-server-on-centos-or-red-hat , and when i try to change my domain DNS server to point ns1.example.com, it says

Address lookup for ns1.example.com failed: Host not found

I know its like chicken and egg problem, but i have no clue for the solution. I saw another thread solution but its godaddy as the domain registrar, it doesnt work for me.

Thanks

Best Answer

Delegating name service

You must ask your domain registrar, Marcaria, to arrange that the nameservice for example.com be delegated to your nameservers. You'll have to give them the Internet-facing publicly-accessible IP-addresses of those nameservers.

In the case of example.com the delegation is carried out by configuring the nameservers for the .com domain. In your case it may be different but your domain registrar should arrange this for you.

Configuring other computers

Most businesses operate split-DNS where the DNS namespace visible to internal users is separate from that available to outside users. This often means that internally you use a separate nameserver for the example.com domain. Either way, for obvious reasons, you specify the nameserver the computer is to use by the nameserver's IP-address, not it's name.

Related Solutions

Dns and custom name servers not updating

DNS data is cached in servers around the world. Checking your servers for changes is likely to mislead you as to whether a change has been made or not.

Looking at your data from here shows that your changes have been made. It looks like your TTL (Time To Live) is about four hours so your changes should be visible to you as well.

When making major changes it is best to make changes in a manner that uses the old and new addresses for a transitional period. One approach would be to publish both the old and new ip addresses at least on TTL period. Then when the transition occurs DNS will have the new addresses to use. Once the transition is done the old IP addresses can be removed.

It is common to change the TTL to a low value prior to the change so that cached data will be refreshed quickly. Scaling down the TTL over a period of time can be used limit the period when most requests are handled by your listed name servers.

EDIT: You can check what various name servers have in their cache with the nslookup or host (newer Linux/Unix distributions) command. You could try google (8.8.4.4 or 8.8.8.8) or OpenDNS (208.67.220.220 or 208.67.222.222) to see what some major caches have. The command for one of the name servers listed above is:

nslookup  ns1.vertigo.bm 8.8.8.8

The timetable I use for scaling down TTL is to reduce it by half whenever the time until the change is twice the current TTL. Keep the TTL at least five or ten minutes. Add the new addresses to the active nameservers 10 to 20 minutes in advance of the change. Remove the old entries after the change has been accomplished.

Ubuntu – Bind Slave Server Notify after adding new zone

The traditional approach is very straightforward. You described how you set up one zone properly with a master and a slave, just do the exact same thing for the next zone as well and that will work too.
Ie, add a type master zone on one server and a type slave zone on the other server.

Notify messages make it possible to get the servers with slave zones to update immediately instead of waiting for the SOA REFRESH timer to expire, but these are not used to add new zones.

However, starting with BIND 9.11 there's also the Catalog Zones feature, which allows setting up a zone with special semantics which defines a list of zones that should be added as slave zones as this special zone is updated with new entries.