Alias server

Hi

Thanks for all your support to date - sorry, another question!

I have a domain jmb-webserver.com that points its A record to my static IP address 92.27.7.240 - this works perfectly.

I have created a new server in virtualmin - lawdaleschool.com - this domain exists and the ‘live’ site is set to my exisiting host provider and doesn’t point to my IP address because I want to set up the site on my server first. The alias is setup as lawdaleschool.jmb-server.com but when using that in a browser I get a search engine page saying it doesn’t exist. I did a network-tools.com check and I get the following:

IP address: 92.27.7.240
Host name: lawdaleschool.jmb-webserver.com

Alias:
jmb-webserver.com
lawdaleschool.jmb-webserver.com
92.27.7.240 is from United Kingdom(UK) in region Western Europe

Any ideas why I can’t access the alias?

All seems OK in the DNS section.

Many thanks (again) in advance

John

When I call up that domain, I get a Joomla post-installation screen telling me to remove the “installation” directory. :wink: So I can’t see an issue here from my end.

Hi,

Yes, it does now because I added a CNAME record lawdaleschool.jmb-webserver.com pointing to jmb-webserver.com at my domain host.

Previously when adding a server in Virtualmin I was able to call the page by adding the server alias to the front of jmb-webserver.com - my server aliases were site.com but I’ve changed that in the template to be first part of the domain only, ie lawdaleschool.jmb-webserver.com

I created a second test server called fred.com and when I tried calling fred.jmb-webserver.com the alias is not picked up when I dont add a CNAME entry.

You can create (reachable) subdomains in your Virtualmin only if the parent domain’s nameserver entries are not just A records pointing to you, but nameserver delegation, as in NS records pointing to your machine (with glue records if necessary). Otherwise the Internet does not know about subdomains you create, but will only query your hoster for them.

In your case, the “jmb-webserver.com” zone is hosted at “ns.srv2.com”, which is probably a nameserver of your hoster, and not your own machine.

You need to configure the NS entry for “jmb-webserver.com” to e.g. “ns1.jmb-webserver.com” with a glue record of “92.27.7.240” (since the NS is itself in the domain to be queried, a glue is necessary).

Then you have to configure Virtualmin so that it uses “ns1.jmb-webserver.com” as your machine name when creating zones, instead of its actual hostname. You can do that in the server templates, section BIND DNS Domain, entry “Master DNS server hostname”. Note that this change only applies to new zones. For existing ones you need to cycle the BIND feature to have the zone recreated.

Note that usually you will need two nameservers though. So if you are to operate the zones yourself, without setting up new addresses at your hoster, you either need two nameservers, or might check with your hoster if they offer “slave nameserver” services.

Another note: it’s not a good idea to make changes (like adding that CNAME) to your setup after posting an issue like this, without adding a note about it. :slight_smile: Cause it gets hard to verify problems from the outside if you continue testing things and thus change the situation.