You'd never guess what I just did

Hey, I bet most of you never thought I'd get this done, but I have the tutorial for adding a DNS zone "done", I'd like it to be alot better, but I finally got to sit here without interuptions from custoemrs or phone calls and get the little 7 step booger out!

I will get you a URL ASAP, fo rnow I am goign to paste the Text, there are a few screenshots that might help some of you.
_________________________

DNS Zone Controls in HSphere

This tutorial will go over the basics of adding a new zone, how to use the zone, and uses for the zone. The uses of DNS Zones in HSphere are numerous, one use for it would be for a HSphere reseller to have a sub-reseller, which PSoft's HSphere does not officially support (nor does ANY HSphere provider I know of) , another would be for domain parking that included a page describing what domain is parked and which company registered the domain, and finally a reseller could have a second set of names to use for customers DNS; these are just some items that I can think of rather quickly, there are many more possibilities. This is primarily targeted to HSphere resellers, and it will not work at the end-user level.

Adding a DNS Zone

1. Login to your Admin Control Panel, Go to E.Manager on the left hand side text menu.

2. Select DNS Manager from the E.Manager sub-menu

3. If you already have your main service domain setup at this point you need to click on, Add DNS Zone.

4. In the field that says Name enter the domain you would like to add a nameserver for, in admin email enter a working email address in the form of user.domain.com instead of user@domain.com. Hit submit to create the zone.

5. After you have successfully completed making the zone we need to make some DNS A records to point our new domain to the nameservers so you can have customized DNS for this domain. Click on the icon that says Edit under the actions column in the DNS Zone review list.

6. Click on Go where it says "Add new Dropdown Box(A) record"

7. In the field for Name, enter what you want your DNS "server" name to be called, I used dns in the example, move to the TTl field, you can leave this at 86400 if you wish, no real reason to change it, and under Data you need to enter your DNS server IP address.

After you submit the A Record, you will go back to a windows like in step 6, but it will have dns( or what you names the dns server).yourdomain.com, you need to repeat step 7 and create a second dns server with a different name, and different IP address.

To host a website form this domain you will HAVE to set it to allow for Service Domains in the Plan Wizard, it will not work any other way, and this is not a security hazard really.



I will be adding to this tutorial soon, hopefully, but I do want to go over a very common problem people run into; when creating you DNS Zone you will many times get and error that the DNS Zone already exists, this simply means that you probably already have the domain setup on your account somewhere and you first need to delete it to free up the Zone, then you can follow the steps as i indicated above.

Also, something I want to make you aware of is that when you have more than one DNS zone, and you have a provider that adds servers that you need to use the Server Alias feature for regularly you will need to make sure you choose YOUR service domain from the drop down list of aliases that you can create, that is really the only downside I know of off hand to using this method of DNS server creation/manipulation.

[jmbeach]

nice job landiserve

Just what I needed to try out shared SSL using a new DNS Zone

Grr, the website wont be up with it today, since I seem to have lost the email, I thought my other email cleint was set to leave emails on the server, guess it wasnt. So it is still stuck on aonther PC a few miles away, and I don't feel like going back tonight, at least I posted the text, get you some images in the morn,.

jmbeach, let me know if you see any problems, of have some suggestions, I am more than welcome to add them, with credit to you on there even if I had already thought of putting it there

[Garreg]

I have a nice tutorial on setting up email accounts - if you need it remote access and all that.....

Garreg, I am going to have an hsphere help site up soon, going to be pretty generic, not tailer for ANy company, but great for resellers, I will tkae anything you want to give.

[ramjet]

nice one stephen.

[Alessandro]

Landiserve,

Thanks again for your work, you're a reference (hope it means the same in english... ;-).

[Alessandro]

Hello Landiserve,

I'm going to put in practice your instructions by doing something radical. It would be very kind if you could go through this post and give your opinion about it (of course anybody can help... ).
I believe this could interest several People in this forum.

My actual situation:
- Reseller account with integradns.com as the main Service Domain;
- hosting the domain integraihp.com under another plan;

What I want to do:
- Keep integradns.com only for nameserver's names;
- Have integraihp become the main Service Domain (cp.integraihp.com etc... instead of cp.integradns.com etc...);

Reading Wonderer in this thread http://www.matrixreseller.com/forum/...&threadid=4079 I understand that if I want to switch the main Service Domain then I must first remove the old one and re-create all up again.

At this point I have a question: if I erase integradns.com then also the nameservers and all the alias are gone. For the alias no problem because no customer of mine is using Hsphere. I suppose also for the domains nothing will happen, as long as I'll re-create the same nameservers few minutes later.
Am I correct or there is something else I'm missing?

At the end these are the steps that should be done:

1) Erase integraihp.com in order to create a new zone in a second time;
2) Erase integradns.com as the main Service Domain (from now on for a little time I'll have no service domain available...);
3) Create the domain integraihp.com in my service account allowing for main Service Domain and do all Matrix's tutorial steps;
4) Create a second Service Domain with integradns.com in the Service Account;
5) Go through your steps 1-7 in order to create the zone file for integradns.com;
6) Re-link in the admin CP hsphere with integraihp.com;
7) Praying for not having done some errors and wait for propagation;

If you found the time to read all this, please drop a note. Your suggestions to accomplish this goal are (like always...;-) well accepted, thanks.

You can do that following my instructions for the most part, basicaly as long as you keep both domains up and running, they can "mirror" each other, you can delete each alias after you create the new zone, and resubmit them as the new server, but I would HIGHLY recommend manually making the SAME entries that the server aliases enter into the other zone as well, that was you have "full mirrors" and your customers wont get errors for DNS pointing to non existant DNS CNAMEs

[Alessandro]

Thanks for the reply, Stephen.
Here in Italy is quite late, I'll take a close look to your info tomorrow.

[Alessandro]

Just a quick question before going to sleep: just to be sure, I shouldn't erase the old service domain before making the new one, right?

NO NO NO, that wouid be a disaster!

Just as a note, i HIGHLY HIGHLY not recomend changing servcie domains.

[Alessandro]

"Just as a note, i HIGHLY HIGHLY not recomend changing servcie domains."

Hmmm.... the thing I was afraid of.
Then I better forget trying to change the service domain integradns.com to integraihp.com (wich it was the idea behind my yesterday's post).

[indianBoy]

please refer to this post: http://www.matrixreseller.com/forum/...ad.php?p=59353

i need to change my nameservsrs! how do i do it?

[Brangwyn]

As we've said in the other thread its not really advised becuase if you already have customers it's a very messy procedure.

Landiserve said it best

Just as a note, i HIGHLY HIGHLY not recomend changing servcie domains.