[Swansea Hackspace] DNS help

[Justin Mitchell]

On Mon, 2018-06-25 at 10:15 +0100, Neil Jones wrote:
> Hi everyone,
> 
> I am setting up some websites on a VPS. My first step is to put a
> single domain name on it and set it up to be a primary DNS server for
> itself and eventually the other sites. These are basically hobby/
> charity sites which I do.
> 
> I am hitting problems. I believe that I have BInd operating without
> any errors. but I still find that dig domainname.com is still
> returning a servfail.

dig domain.name soa @server.name

to tell the difference between your dns server not serving the records,
and the domain not having been delegated to you.

check that the serial number and details reported in that SOA record
match the ones in your zone file.

if your server also gives a fail you need to look at what it said when
you loaded the zone files, usually in /var/log/messages it should print
a whole pile of complains when you restart bind, or forced a running
reload with 'rndc reload'

if your server does give the right records then check the delegation,
start with 'whois domain.name' to see what the listed name servers are.
Yours should be one of them, and the other will need to be one that is
setup to slave / secondary (ie copy) off your server.

if you reply directly to me with details i can take a look for you and
try to point the right way.