Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : Hosting Software and Control Panels : Why does WHM setup DNS zones this way?

[raindog308]

My VPS provider installed cPanel/WHM for me. I'm quite comfortable with DNS, but am a little confused about WHM's approach to it.

When I go into DNS functions, I see three zones created:

• ns1.example.com
• ns2.example.com
• host.example.com

...where "example.com" is my domain and "host" is the hostname I chose.

The ns1 zone has these records:

ns1.example.com. IN A...
localhost.ns1.example.com. IN A 127.0.0.1
ns1.example.com. IN MX 0 ns1.example.com.
mail IN CNAME ns1.example.com.
www IN CNAME ns1.example.com.
ftp IN CNAME ns1.example.com.

ns2 is the same with s/ns2/ns1/.

host.example.com is

host.example.com. IN A ...
localhost.host.example.com. IN A 127.0.0.1
host.example.com. IN MX 0 host.example.com.
mail IN CNAME host.example.com.
www IN CNAME host.example.com.
ftp IN CNAME host.example.com.

What I don't understand is...

• why not create a single example.com zone?
• why the localhost records?
• why define mail, www, ftp, etc. aliases in each zone?

[jcarney1987]

Originally Posted by raindog308

• why not create a single example.com zone?

When I installed Cpanel I added my primary domain then deleted those ns records and put them into my primary domain. It added it like that because I assume you clicked add A records when you put the name servers into the server configuration page.

Originally Posted by raindog308

• why the localhost records?

Not really sure why they added a localhost record.

Originally Posted by raindog308

• why define mail, www, ftp, etc. aliases in each zone?

It allows you to access your domain like
mail.domain.com
ftp.domain.com
www is normaly a cname but an A records can sub in.

[raindog308]

Originally Posted by jcarney1987

When I installed Cpanel I added my primary domain then deleted those ns records and put them into my primary domain. It added it like that because I assume you clicked add A records when you put the name servers into the server configuration page.

Thanks for your reply. Yes, I've always done a single zone per domain (or one per subdomain if there was subdomain.example.com).

Still find the localhost record odd - it's defined in /etc/hosts, and is probably hardwired into every DNS or client library since it's in the RFC. 0

I get the mail/ftp/www/etc. CNAMEs, but not the idea of putting them in three different zones