Questions about multiple domain names

Maintenance
1

Thanks to this post, I was able to figure out how to add email accounts for all of my sites. This just saved me $180/year from Hover!

However, I woke up this morning to a series of warning messages in my email so I have some questions…

The nameservers set on this domain are incorrect

Do I just need to add my box’s nameservers to my domains? My other domains are hosting websites, will they get messed up by adding more nameservers?

Secondary nameserver ns1.digitalocean.com is not configured correctly. (It resolved this domain as 000.111.22.333. It should be 444.555.666.777.)

Same as my question before. This seems like it would definitely make my domains point to my mail server rather than the website they’re currently hosting.

Final question, is there a way to suppress some of these warnings?

This domain should resolve to your box’s IP address (A 444.555.666.777) if you would like the box to serve webmail or a website on this domain.

My webmail works fine actually, so I am confused by this warning.

2

You should point your other domains to use your box’s nameservers. You should also go into the Admin panel then Custom DNS and set an A record that points to where your websites are hosted. This will allow your box to be the nameservers but point all traffic to the hosting websites.

It sounds like you have Digital Ocean’s nameservers still listed in your domain information at the registrar.

Once you correct the above, the warnings will go away. After you make changes, you can simply look at the Status Check page (allowing for propagation time) to check if what you did is correct.

3

A word of warning: the downside to using your mail-in-a-box to serve DNS is reliability. If your box goes down (even something as simple as rebooting) , so do all your domains.

It would be excellent if MiaB made it easy to set up zone transfers to a secondary (or something). Then the primary box could go down and – except for email piling up waiting to be delivered – nobody outside your domain would notice.

4

I didn’t even think about that. Good thing I didn’t make the changes @v60fan suggested yet.

I think I’ll just keep things as they are because nothing’s broken right now.

5

Secondary DNS is very easy. On Custom DNS you can find instructions.

6

Try 1984.is and puck.nether.net . Config. them as your MiAB Custom DNS and at your BOX domain registar nameservers panel, as your secundary (slave) DNS servers.
Additionally, if your domains registar is Gandi.net they offer you a ns6.gandi.net secundary DNS entry, too

  • I setup those three ones by default at each MiaB I build and all of them work as expected.
1 Like
7

Thanks @just4t, those seem to be working great. Yep, easy, and I’m sleeping better already.

8

I hereby rescind my warning to @netoperatorwibby… Once you set up secondary DNS, there’s little or no downside to running all your DNS straight off mail-in-a-box. And there’s a lot of upside, mostly in simplicity and automatic updates.