The company i work for just begun hosting a new website and had to transfer the domain name from the ISP to a different hosting company.
Now the website is accessible from outside the network but not accessible from inside the network. The ISP is the same and we can't access the website using our ISP. It doesn't resolve the DNS Name at all.
If i try to ping the website, it says "host lookup failed", even nslookup is failing. When trying to access the website via the IPaddress, it refuses.
The problem is in the ISP but I don't know how to solve it and our ISP isn't being very helpful.
This often happens when someone is running authoritative and recursive DNS on the same servers. Which is why you should never do that :)
It also happens when your local domain (Active Directory?) is the same as the domain you use at your hoster. Never do that. For example: if your domain is example.com then don't use example.com as your local domain. If you do then both your hoster and your own servers believe they are authoritative for that domain. Once the zone data starts to diverge you have this kind of weird problems. Instead use a subdomain of your domain name for your office, like office.example.com so that example.com can remain authoritative at the hoster.
If you do have the same domain both locally and at the hoster then you have to manually make sure that the information in your local DNS server stays in sync with the hoster's DNS server. For example: if your hoster has record www.example.com A 192.0.2.1 then you have to have the same record in your local DNS server. When the hoster changes the record to e.g. www.example.com A 192.0.2.222 then you have to make the same change otherwise your local DNS server will keep telling you that www.example.com is at 192.0.2.1. The same happens when you change hoster as they will almost certainly use different IP addresses.
So if you can then don't use the domain name itself in your office but use a subdomain. If that is impossible then you will have to manually keep the hoster's and your own DNS zone data in sync. Because this always goes wrong and breaks in 'interesting' ways really try to use a subdomain though!
PS: and never ever use somebody else's domain name as your local domain. I have seen ICT companies use local domains like <localcityname>.com and then suddenly the whole company can't access the real domain anymore because the local servers think it's theirs.
Related
I am a bit new to the deployment of a website. I have a server which is written in Node.js. Previously I had been using Heroku for deploying my apps without knowing much about deployment. I would like to know how do I deploy my server to create a website which has .com at the end of it like www.example.com and not www.example.herokuapp.com. I think it has something to do with domains (correct me if I am wrong). I would like to know what exactly is a domain and a DNS provider and how to deploy a website in such a way. Thank you.
You should ask one question to yourself when you hit www.example.com in browser how does it load a page?. When you run a website on your laptop it basically runs locally, if you want to access your website over the internet you would require public IP(host or server) accessible over the internet so you can access a webpage using public IP:port. But this is not the best option because IP may change in the future and also remembering IP for each application will be difficult. Imagine if you access Facebook, Instagram or any other websites by its IP addresses how difficult and inconvenient would it be? There are a couple of things you should know.
DNS-> Domain Name system
Every host is identified by the IP address but remembering numbers is
very difficult for the people and also the IP addresses are not static
therefore, a mapping is required to change the domain name to IP
address. So DNS is used to convert the domain name of the websites to
their numerical IP address.
DNS is a hostname to IP address translation service. DNS is a distributed database implemented in a hierarchy of name servers. It is an application layer protocol for message exchange between clients and servers.
Name servers
Domain Name Servers (DNS) are the Internet's equivalent of a phone book. They maintain a directory of domain names and translate them to Internet Protocol (IP) addresses. This is necessary because, although domain names are easy for people to remember, computers or machines, access websites based on IP addresses.
DNS record
A domain name, IP address what is the validity?? what is the time to live ?? and all the information related to that domain name.
Once you understand the DNS
Host(Deploy) your website to Amazon EC2 or Heroku and obtain Public IP.
Buy a domain from domain provider like Godaddy
Map domain(ie www.example.com to IP)-> DNS record
Mapping domain to IP may vary platform to platform but the Core principle remains the same. I would suggest you these below link. Try to find differences in both, doing so you will learn along the way
http://www.littlebigextra.com/map-domain-name-amazon-aws-ec2-instance/
https://medium.com/progress-on-ios-development/connecting-an-ec2-instance-with-a-godaddy-domain-e74ff190c233
I have a VPS server on OVH, it just has its own ip and Reverse DNS.
So i basically always used domain trough cloudflare and pointed a record to my VPS IP.
I don't want to use cloudflare anymore, I've bought the DNS Anycast option for my domain and pointed a record to my VPS IP, but website just stopped working.. What should i do ?
I have 3 more domains, i would want to make some ns1.mydomain.com ns2.mydomain.com zones based on my main domain, so i could use it for all my other domains, How can i do that?
ps. In case if this info is needed, all my domains are in OVH too.
1) You could revert back to previous state. Other than that, it is difficult to troubleshoot DNS issues without real domain name.
2) DNS is crucial part of infrastructure, you don't want to host that by yourself unless you know what you are doing.
This might be a stupid question but i would really appreciate any compact answer.
I have uploaded a Joomla site on my local machine using a static IP address (213.221.211.111 for example). I have registered a domain (like www.example.com) on Godaddy.com. Within their dashboard, I set the primary and secondary name servers (I looked it from my router setup page).
Is there any else I need to do so that entering e.g. www.example.com would take the user to 213.221.211.111.
Inside of godaddy, you need to map "www" to your static IP address. It would be a good idea to also map the default entry for your domain, sometimes called "#".
Edit: Upon further reading of your original question, you don't set the primary and secondary DNS servers for your domain to your ISP's servers. Your domain's primary and secondary servers are for the addresses of the servers that are responsible for serving your domain. Unless you have your domain hosted with your ISP and not with godaddy, then this is not the right thing to do at all. If you have your domain hosted with godaddy, follow their instructions for setting up a domain and pointing "www" at an IP address.
In addition to what jricher said, you will also probably need to port forward.
I have been attempting to set up magento on a shared hosting server that doesn't support innoDB, ergo its not been possible. The domain I want to use has also been registered with this rubbish hosting provider. (one[dot]com for anyones reference). So I thought I would be able to point this domain to a different hosting provider that DOES support it, but one[dot]com doesnt allow me to change nameservers for the domain. They just said this:
You can only setup IP address, CNAME and web forwarding in our DNS settings but not change of nameservers
Would there be any way to change any of these settings or the .htaccess file so that, for example
http://www.mydomain.com/folder/page.php?query=string
Would display a page from the other server
http://xxx.xxx.xxx:xx/folder/page.php?query=string
I've created loads of sits doing all sorts but never really needed to other with the domain administration side of things.
You don't need to change name servers to map a domain to a different server. If the "good" provider supports it (i.e. allows you to register a domain on the server that isn't hosted by the company), just switch the A and MX records to the new server's IP address.
You do need the cooperation of the "good" provider for this, though.
If they're letting you set up the IP address, then setting the IP address of www.mydomain.com to xxx.xxx.xxx.xx should do the trick. On the other server, you'll need its webserver to be set up to serve www.mydomain.com as a virtual domain - if you're using a hosting provider they should do this for you; if not it should be fairly easy to set up (consult the manual of whichever web server software you're using).
I have someone telling me that DNS servers only start responding after the whois record is updated to point at their DNS servers. Is this normal behaviour? Or should a DNS server respond before the whois record is updated?
Also, once the domain is active, (so either after the domain is added or after the whois record is update, depending on the answer to the above question) how long till the name servers should start responding?
I'm not referring to the time that it takes to propagate acorss the internet, but just the time on the name server for the domain. I am also not concerned with when the rest of the internet sees the change, only wondering when that DNS server should respond when using a command such as:
nslookup www.example.com ns1.dnsserver.com
For the DNS servers to be found what you call the whois record must know where to find them.
Stricly speaking, the whois record contains much more than just the DNS servers for a domain, but let's not nitpick.
Say your DesktopA needs to connect to example.com, the following servers will be contacted, assuming the answer wasn't already cached by your ISP's DNS or the local machine.
DesktopA has DNS settings pointing to the ISP, so DektopA will ask the ISP's DNS servers if they know where example.com. is located (its IP).
ISP DNS server doesn't know, so it will contact the root domain database for com. (all Fully Qualified Domain Names end in a ., even though we generally don't use it explicitly, but you can try insert it in web requests, it should work fine).
This bootstrap list of global root servers is usually updated by the OS regularly.
The root servers will know which Top Level Domain TLD server to contact for each global domain such as .com, .org, .uk, etc.
In our example, the ISP will ask the root which server to query for com domains.
The root server answers with the IP address of one of the the .COM TLD servers.
The ISP DNS server will now contact the .COM TLD server and ask it where to find EXAMPLE.
The .COM database record for example.com will contain the 2 (or more) DNS servers registered along with the domain name example.com. These are part of your whois record.
The ISP now has the IP addresses of the DNS servers for example.com as setup in the whois. It will query the first one (or the second one if the first isn't available) and ask it: what's the IP of 'example.com'?
The DNS server for example.com will look in its records and return the A record defined for the example.com domain as IP 1.2.3.4 for instance.
Your ISP's DNS server will cache this information for a predetermined amount of time (TTL) and return the IP 1.2.3.4 to DesktopA.
Desktop A can now contact the server for example.com directly by its IP.
DesktopA may cache this information for a little while for fast lookup.
Tis would be the same for subdomains such as www.example.com or john.people.example.com. Everything before the domain example.com must be declared in your DNS server so when someone query for their address, your DNS server for example.com can look up the definitions and answer them (it could very well pass them on to another server as well if necessary).
In conclusion
So, to go back to your question, your whois record must be set with the proper DNS records for your domain before anyone can access them using that domain name.
DNS Servers operate completely separate from the Whois server. The relation of how fast DNS is updated after Whois depends completely on the registrar. A registrar or web host may update DNS within a second or 2 of a customer making a change in the control panel, or it may take minutes or hours if they make updates in batch mode.
Ideally all DNS changes that a customer request should happen very quickly on the DNS server (within a few seconds), but as you note, there may be a delay until changes propagate across the internet.