Right Steps to set up Mail-In-a-Box on a different host

[Martin]

Hello,

We have this situation:

1. Website is on its own shared web hosting with it’s own domain name: eg. abc.com
2. I set up a linode to host Mail-In-a-Box and it ended up being at e.g. box.abc.com At that point I didn’t want to touch the dns records in the registrar.
3. I was able to install Mail in a box however. I had several errors related to the DNS. And also the TLS not being able to be automatically installed.

Problem is, if I modify the Name servers prior to installation, my website will become unavailable (which actually happened the first time I installed Mail-In-a-Box following the tutorial).

Now, let’s suppose that having the Main website unavailable for a few hours is okay.
If I set the Names servers to ns1.box.abc.com and ns2.box.abc.com whenever someone navigates to abc.com they will be routed to box.abc.com

I attemped creating A records in the registrar and still traffic was being routed to box.abc.com

My domain registrar is name.com

So my question is, what would be the necessary steps to set up mail in a box in a situation like this, when you do have a website up and running in the main domain and you want to install Mail-In-a-Box in a subdomain?

Hope you guys can help me.

Thanks much in advance,

Martin

[v60fan]

Hi Martin,

1. You need to change the nameservers for abc.com at your registrar to ns1.box.abc.com and ns2.box.abc.com
2. Then you set the A record for your abc.com website using the Custom DNS on your box. You would navigate to https://box.abc.com/admin/ to find this admin console, login, then choose System->Custom DNS. You would probably want to create 2 records: 1 for abc.com (leaving subdomain blank) and 1 for www.abc.com (input www as the subdomain).

Hopefully that makes sense for you.

[Martin]

Thank you so much v60fan!
It worked out just perfect.

Regards,

Martin