DirectAdmin, DNS zone transfer and reverse DNS.

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Pentium100

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Jan 28, 2013
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Hi, we are using DA for hosting, but currently DNS servers are separate and configured manually. Those servers resolve forward as well as reverse requests. What would be the smartest way to use DA for DNS management?

1. Set up DA DNS server as master for its domains, set the others as slaves. PTR records get resolved the old way.
2. Set up DA DNS server as master for everything (including PTR), won't there be any problems?
3. Some other configuration?

Also, is there a way to automatically add zones to the slave servers? I mean when I add a new domain to DA, it updates its own DNS server, but I would have to manually update the sale servers and add the new zone to transfer.
 
@chatwizrd:

Not necessarily a good idea; then you need to do all your DNS manually or set up a completely seoparate system for both you and your clients. While you can do this with someting like WHMCS through various registrars, using registrar configured VPS, you may need plugins, and it will take extra steps. With DirectAdmin it's fully automated.

@Pentium100:

We use our DNS server as the hidden masters for forward DNS, with our published nameservers being slaves. For rDNS, since we like managing it manually, we use one of our dedicated nameservers as a master for rDNS, and the others as slaves.

We add slave configuration to the slaves with our Master2Slave DNS Replicator software; it's open source and you can search for it on these forums.

Jeff
 
@nobaloney

You approach seems interesting, though I guess I will use DA DNS as a hidden master (like you) for the domains that already exist (and belong to us) while the hosting users will just use the DA DNS straight. Reverse records will just stay in the old servers. I will look into the "Master2Slave DNS Replicator" software.

There is a small problem however. Because this is an ISP, there are DNS records for every client IP (forward and reverse). If I paste them in the DA DNS zone db, then the resulting webpage becomes huge and really impractical to use. I used $INCLUDE directives in the old server to split the huge database to multiple files. I tried dong that here, but DA strips the $INCLUDE directives when saving the zone file.

Is there a way of having $INCLUDE directives in the zone file or just hiding records from the DA UI?
 
zEitEr said:
With a deep customization of DNS templates which DA uses and with a help of PRE/POST scripts I'd rather say it can be achieved.
Click to expand...

Thank you for the suggestion. This slipped my mind.

I copied the named.db template to "custom" directory and added this at the end of the file:

|*if DOMAIN="example.com"|
$INCLUDE ...
$INCLUDE ...
|*endif|

Then I added and removed a record and now all the include statements are appended to the .db file of the main domain.
 
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