Hihi, I am new to using Virtualmin and in general to web development and hosting.
I’ve bought a domain on dondominio and configured it to redirect all mydomain.com and *.mydomain.com to my own server IP.
I had apache2 installed with a really simple webpage but now that I want to make more websites using subdomains and everything I wanted to try Virtualmin.
My problem is… if I already have a domain on dondominio, do I need to have BIND DNS installed and active on Virtualmin?
I don’t know if I should disable it, configure it in some way or what to do… I’ve never worked with DNS so… I need help here.
What do you recomend? Should I disssble BIND DNS? Should I use it? If I should use it, how?
I recommend you follow the documentation; start with a freshly installed OS (no Apache, no BIND, no domains setup, etc.), and then install Virtualmin as documented. Then create your domain using Virtualmin.
That will install BIND. Whether you use it to host domains locally is up to you. For one domain, it’s probably best to leave it hosted with your registrar or whatever. You can disable the DNS feature in Virtualmin and stop/disable the BIND service.
I did that, I uninstalled apache, php and mysql before installing virtualmin.
The thing now is… can I use BIND DNS to register new domines like idk, example1.xyz and make it available for the whole internet or I have to buy example1.xyz on dondominio for example for it to work and be accesible?
I’m completely lost on this dns topic sorry.
EDIT: If I’m not wrong, you can’t make domain available as you have to register it. In that case, BIND is literally useles and you’ll have the DNS where you registered it I think.
Apache for example will filter conectons depending on the url so, you don’t need it here. Maybe for mail?
That’s not what I suggested. It might be OK, but it’s just as likely you have a broken installation, possibly broken in ways that won’t be obvious for a day or a week or a month. The installer can’t possibly deal with all the configuration changes you made during your experimentation. I strongly recommend you start with a freshly installed supported OS, as documented.
BIND is not a domain registrar. It is a domain name server. You register domains with a registrar (e.g. NameCheap, Gandi, etc.). If you wish to host name service locally, you then set the glue records at your registrar for your zones to tell the world that your Virtualmin server (and your secondary DNS server) is authoritative for those zones.
How you manage glue records is dependent on your registrar, and you’d need to read the documentation they provide. People hosting on a small scale often find it easiest to let the registrar host their DNS. If you disable the DNS feature in Virtualmin, you will have a “Suggested DNS Records” page which provides a list of records you need for various services you have enabled in Virtualmin.
Search the forum (and the web in general) for “glue records” for a lot more discussion of the topic. You should get familiar with basic DNS topics. It’s where many new web devs waste a lot of time and break a lot of things, because they think they don’t need to understand it (or they think they understand it, but there mental model for how it works is horribly broken). We also have a lot of documentation about BIND and DNS in the Webmin docs. BIND DNS Server | Webmin
We used to have some DNS-related tutorials in the Webmin docs, as well, I’m not sure why all the tutorials were removed in the recent migration. I’ll have to ask @Ilia