0

Ok so I am EXTREMELY new at networking stuff and am a programmer by trade. I need help badly.

I have two servers, one live the other in house. Both worked until last week when I wiped the in house one and migrated the live one. I did not originally set up our network I instead play detective to solve how things were setup previously. I had been looking for a while to figure out how the domain prefixes were setup (i.e. vpn.domain.com, ftp.domain.com, web.domain.com, etc) to point at our server, mail, ftp, vpn, etc without any record in GoDaddy, our domain name seller. No sign of subdomains in our live server either where a possible redirect to ip could have been done.

I have since learned that there are DNS zones in CPanel in our live server that have all the prefixes I described but since a bunch of things point to dyn-dns.anything.com I am worried. We just decided to delete the account with DynDNS a few days ago so now weird things are happening. Two webpages are down which makes no sense since the domain name points right at the webpage ip and I have now found a long options page inside of CPanel with a ton of options with the zone file. I just am not sure what it all means. Inside GoDaddy the DNS zone files are missing and say they are elsewhere. So maybe they somehow were allowed to be moved to the DNS zone inside of this CPanel of the domain names webpage?

So... my

Questions

  1. Is Dyn-DNS somehow working with Cpanel to perform DNS resolution to all those prefixed services?
  2. Is there a way to work without DynDNS being needed?
  3. Why would someone have set this up this way? Is this normal? Whynot use the inhouse server as the DNS server and populate it outselves?
  4. Is there a better solution to combine my need for vpn.foo and web.bar with the same domain name as some of my websites? So example.com(web page) vpn.example.com (in house server ip with port) , and so on....
4
  • 1
    Personally, I think there is a good chance I will go mad from trying to read that huge chunk of text.
    – BenjiWiebe
    Jan 6, 2015 at 1:55
  • It is common for DNS to be hosted with an external service rather than in-house because frankly it's easier and they usually do it better. These companies do DNS for a living, so typically they have servers all around the world for faster lookups and higher reliability. You can certainly host DNS yourself, but there are some security and reliability considerations that you would need to take into account.
    – tlng05
    Jan 6, 2015 at 3:19
  • To see how your DNS is currently set up, go to viewdns.info and enter your domain under the "DNS Report" section. It will tell you what your nameservers are so you can see whether or not it is currently hosted with Dyn-DNS.
    – tlng05
    Jan 6, 2015 at 3:20
  • Very useful tool thanks i will be using it from now on.
    – GoreDefex
    Jan 7, 2015 at 19:50

0

You must log in to answer this question.

Browse other questions tagged .