I am looking for a Network Admin who knows DirectAdmin/Linux to help me set up a brand new dedicated box which will host two simple HTML sites. I am a newbie and am having trouble figuring out how to set up the DNS.

It should not take longer than 30 min's but I also would like to learn how to do it since I'm very interested in the knowledge than just having someone do it. I have just come to the end of my rope and must put my hands up in defeat.

College Kid looking for a little help.

There's nothing to it my friend ;)

Register your nameservers at your registrar (ns1 and ns2 most likely).

Then in direct admin login, and go to administrator settings, and set them as your name servers.

Tada DNS is all setup ;) All that's left is to add the domains to your account.

Ok, so I go to my Registrar (GoDaddy) buy my domain, then go to "create" name servers. I make NS1 & NS2, but then they ask me to type in an IP. What IP do I put in? When I got my dedicated box my server came with one IP address.

Well you should have more than one IP address if you are going to be hosting your own DNS.

IIRC godaddy will not let you register two name servers to the same IP. If you don't mind me asking which host are you through? Many of them provide you with at least two dedicated IPs for your machine, and quite a few of them do a block of 8 (5 usable).

For ns1 you would type in the IP of your server. You will not be able to make an ns2 though. You can still try it without a second nameserver and I believe it will work.

Oh ok, so wait a second. So i'm trying to host my own DNS server and webserver on the same box it's sounding. See a buddy of mine told me to sign up for a DNS server account at DNSmadeeasy.com which I have done.

So maybe I should just use DNSmadeeasy instead of trying to have my own DNS server on my webserver.

You can use DNSmadeeasy if you want, that's a great service.

I was just assuming you were trying to host your DNS and web services on the same machine. In that case there is nothing that you have to setup on your directadmin machine for the DNS portion of things.

You will still need to put values in on the administrator settings, and for that I would just put in the namservers for DNSMadeeasy (the ones that they gave you for your domain).

Then go ahead and create the account, and at DNSMadeeasy point the proper records to your server.

There should be:

yourdomain.com. A 111.111.111.111
ftp A 111.111.111.111
mail A 111.111.111.111
pop A 111.111.111.111
www A 111.111.111.111
mail MX 10

where 111.111.111.111 is the IP of your server.

That should do it.

If you still need assistance, please let me know.

Ok, so I think I have learned a great deal from all the help I have recieved. There is still one thing that I am having trouble with. So I set the NS in the administrator settings, so it is set to one set of name servers. The question is now: I create more websites to put in this same server, how do I let those websites use different name servers. Anytime I create a new user i.e. website it puts in the default name servers of the box. Am I forced to only use this one "main" set of NS's or can I create custom NS's for each one of my new websites I throw up on the box?

The nameserver section in DirectAdmin is used if you are hosting your own nameservers. I believe it has to be filled out even if you are using an external DNS server (such as DNSmadeeasy).

When you add a domain to directadmin it creates the Zone file (all the DNS records) on the server for that domain. It needs to know the nameservers for that zone file. In addition to setting up the zone file it also needs to know what they are to have bind running.

In your situation you could have any nameservers you wanted in there and it would not make a difference.

Now if you were hosting your DNS you would not be putting different nameservers for each website on your server as they would all need to have your nameservers or it wouldn't work.

Assume we have:

Domain1.com
Domain2.com
Domain3.com

and just one server.

Now we are hosting our own DNS servers, ns1.domain.com and ns2.domain.com on that one server. If you set Domain2.com to ns1.something.com and ns2.something.com then your server will not have control over the DNS so it would not matter what the zone file on your server said.

This is where we run into what you will be doing. Each time you add a domain to the server you need to set that domains nameservers to the ones for DNSMadeEasy and then set the records at DNSMadeEasy to point to your server.

Does this make sense and/or answer your questions?

It is a GREAT reply, thanks for your help. I'm just a newbie and still having a little trouble understanding it all. It's a lot to take in.

No problem, any other questions feel free to contact me anytime.