svanneste said:
DA is setup to manage the DNS automatically and the DNS zones were well created.
The second part of your first sentence is an interesting assumption, since you complain that the DNS zone is NOT created properly.
Actually some people on the
[email protected] mailing list (run by Bind's creators and created by both the actual authors, and by Cricket Liu, who coauthored the O'Reilly book "DNS and Bind", say otherwise. They indicate that DA is actually not in accordance with the documentation in the way it creates separate zones for subdomains created separately rather than through the "subdomain" creation facility in the menu, either because the main domain isn't on the same server, or for any other reason (perhaps because you want separate people responsible for the subdomain and don't want the people who can ftp to one to be able to ftp to the other).
I have discussed this issue with DA support already, but I've been been too busy to discuss my conclusions with them as yet.
I tried to create one subdomain manually without more success: the subdomain can now be reached using
http://www.
I doubt that you can reach your own subdomain by using
http://www. since "www" is not a valid second level domain to the first level or "root" domain, specified by the "." character. If you can, then your own DNS is seriously broken. I certainly can't. When I try using Netscape I get "www..com" not found. When I try using IE, I get an msn search page telling me that "www." can't be found.
My guess is that you're obfuscating the real domain name. That's a fatal error when asking for help with DNS. If you won't disclose the problem domain there's no way to trace it for you. I have some very good tools and some very good people at my disposal and I'll be happy to troubleshoot your DNS problem (if it is that) for you, but I can't if you won't give me real information.
I will say that I've created subdomains two out of three possible ways on two DA systems, and they both work fine.
1) I created a domain through the subdomain button on the DA control panel. That creates an entry for the subdomain in the DA dns zone file for the main domain, and creates a seperate subdirectory for the subdomain in the domain's directory tree, under public_html. In short, it works, though it doesn't create a sample index.html file as DA does when it creates a new main domain.
Until I created an index.html file I got a "this page cannot be displayed" error.
Note that DA does not create a "www" entry for the subdomain in the dns zone file when you do it this way, so accessing by
www.subdomain.example.com won't work.
2) I created a subdomain as if it were a main domain, for a domain already on the same server. This worked as well, though DA created a new zone file for the subdomain and didn't add the proper delegation record to the zone file for the main domain.
In this case (#2)
www.subdomain.example.com will work, as an entire zone file is created automatically by DA.
The third way I didn't try, as it can't work without hand-massaging of the DNS zone file for the main domain. That way would be to have the main domain hosted on one server and the subdomain hosted on another. For it to work, you'd have to either maintain the dns zone file manually somewhere, with both the domain and subdomain records in it, or that you'd allow the two servers to each maintain their own zone files, but manually insert a delegation NS record in the zone file for the main domain pointing to the nameserver for the subdomain.
Sorry, but I can't help you further until and unless you disclose the real domain and subdomain names you're having a problem with.
Jeff
