Setting DNS for two domains and two servers

Question

Setting DNS for two domains and two servers

I am managing two servers. One Snow Leopard and one Mountain Lion.

The Snow Leopard server is our main server, the Mountain Lion one is a secondary server and was upgraded to Mountain Lion because it was needed to run a particular application.

Server 1 provides file, mail and DNS services for one of our domains. Server 2 does the same for the second domain.

The website for the first domain is hosted externally by a third party. I have used the address ww.xxx.yy.zz in the listings below.

I want server 1 to return the local address for the server to any query other than www. which I want it to point externally. I also need server 1 to be able to resolve the address of server 2.

When I try to change any DNS settings on server 1 I am told I cannot save the changes. This remains the case as long as server 2 (the second primary zone) exists. I can save the changes if I delete the second primary zone and the primary zone then reappears.

Server 1 when trying to resolve the IP of server 2 returns the external address which means we cannot send mail from server 1 to server 2.

Server 1 can resolve the www. address correctly but clients pointing at server 1 for DNS services cannot resolve the www. address.

This should I think be really simple to setup but I cannot manage to get anything to let me do what I think is needed which is:

Both servers and all local clients resolve as follows:

server1.com, mail.server1.com, server1.co.uk & server1.com all resolve to 10.21.0.253

www.server1.com resolves to ww.xxx.yy.zz

server2.co.uk resolves to 10.21.0.252

This is a summary of all the DNS settings on both servers. There reall are only a handful of entries. Any suggestions as to how to make this actually work would be appreciated.

Server 1 running 10.6.8

253.0.21.10.in-addr.arpa. reverse zone

10.21.0.253 reverse mapping server1.com

yy.xxx.ww.in-addr.arpa. reverse zone

ww.xxx.yy.zz reverse mapping www.server1.com

server1.com primary zone

mail.server1.com alias

server1.co.uk alias

server1.com machine 10.21.0.253

www.server1.com machine ww.xxx.yy.zz

serve2.co.uk primary zone

Server 2 running 10.8.2

Primary zone .co.uk

server2.co.uk machine 10.21.0.252

server2.co.uk nameserver

Reverse Zone: 0.21.10.in-addr.arp

10.21.0.252 reverse mapping

server2.co.uk nameserver

MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.7.4)

Posted on Mar 17, 2013 4:54 PM

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Answer 1

Best reply

Camelot

Level 9

54,339 points

Mar 17, 2013 10:05 PM in response to James Hamilton - Periscope

There are errors in your domain data, but it's not clear whether that's the result of your obfuscation, or whether they're for real.

For example, you say server2 has a primary zone of '.co.uk;. That's not going to work.

In either case, part of your problem is that both servers think they're responsible for the 10.21.0.x reverse zone, with different servers in them.

My suggestion would be to simplify your setup - set one server as primary for all domains. Set the second server as secondary, pulling the data from the first server. It doesn't appear to me that you're gaining anything by separating the domain hosting across the two servers.

If you do opt to run one server as primary for each domain, you need to setup the other server as a secondary for the other domain - so server1 is primary for domain1, secondary for domain2 off server2; and server2 is primary for domain2 and secondary for domain1 off server1. In that way they should be able to resolve the various internal addresses, but like I said there's little (or no) advantage to doing that vs. having one server as primary for both domains (that will help with the reverse DNS setup, anyway)

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Answer 2

Mar 18, 2013 12:45 AM in response to Camelot

I agree that it seems over complex. I also agree that the primary zone for server 2 seems wrong too.

I have tried to remove the primary zone for server 2 from server 2 which seems to work but server 1 is still behaving very strangely.

If I delete the server 2 primary zone from the server 1 DNS it just recreates itself. Once it is recreated the server 2 primary zone on server 1 has nothing in it and it will not let me add records. If I add a record it gets an error to say that there is no name server for the domain. Adding a name server and pointing it at server 1 gets me an error about reverse zones and then messing with the reverse zone just ends up with all the data for the server 2 zone vanishing.

There has got to be something obvious that I am missing.

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Answer 3

Mar 18, 2013 2:09 AM in response to James Hamilton - Periscope

It looks like the server 2 primary zone may be some kind of zombie zone.

Every time I delete it it pops back into being.

I did find a possibly relevant thread here: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3151784?start=0&tstart=0 but having looked through that thread it seems I need to be looking for

~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.ServerAdmin.plist which may be the cause of my zombie zone. Sadly that plist file does not exist.

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