I have a droplet on Digital Ocean and recently installed Virtualmin to manage stuff. So, I have BIND DNS enabled as a module, I create a Virtual Server and say yes to DNS for this domain. I see the name server is set to NS1.DigitalOcean.com. Two questions:
i) how does the Virtualmin select the primary DNS? How does it “know” to use DO?
ii) Given that the primary DNS is set to DO’s nameservers, how would an incoming look-up know to look at the settings generated by my Virtualmin installation? Or is Virtualmin writing records to the main host (DO’s) DNS?
Or is BIND some kind of link-up between the two?
Just trying to figure out what’s going on under the bonnet
Actually, if you’re using nameservers setup at Digital Ocean, you wouldn’t actually want to use Virtualmin’s BIND/DNS feature.
So long as the nameservers are setup as “NS1.DigitalOcean.com”, you would want to disable the DNS feature for that domain, which would mean DNS lookups would query Digital Ocean’s server to get the correct IP address for your domain.
Currently, what would be happening is that Virtualmin would be generating DNS information on your own server for this particular domain – but since your domain is setup to use NS1.DigitalOcean.com as the nameserver, the records Virtualmin generates wouldn’t be used in most cases (but, leaving that enabled could cause occasional problems).
