Help me get my DNS settings in order.
March 15, 2010 11:20 AM   Subscribe

Please help me figure out DNS settings so I can get my new domain, hosting account, Tumblr blog, and Google Apps to all play nicely.

(Please bear with me, this is somewhat of a complicated situation and I am by no means an expert when it comes to DNS or websites. Some of my terms may be a little off. If you need to ask questions, I'll clarify as best I can.)

I recently purchased a shared hosting account and a domain name. I have transferred the DNS from my registrar to my hosting account by putting in the nameservers for my hosting account into my registrar. I don't have a dedicated IP, and I don't have direct access to DNS and other intricate settings with my hosting provider, so I have to email them to make any changes for me. I do have access to a small number of things through cPanel. For the purposes of this question, let's assume that the IP provided by the hosting company is 66.55.44.33 and that the domain is mycoolsite.com. Here is what I want to accomplish:

1. I want http://mycoolsite.com to point directly to a Tumblr blog I set up, and I want all the URLs and everything to work properly, with no masking.

2. I want http://static.mycoolsite.com to point to a folder within my hosting. So let's say that in order to get to that folder directly, I have to type http://66.55.44.33/~mycoolsite/static. I want anything in the folder "static" to be at the root of http://static.mycoolsite.com. Therefore, http://66.55.44.33/~mycoolsite/static/main.css is equivalent to http://static.mycoolsite.com/main.css.

3. I want Google Apps set up on the domain, with http://mail.mycoolsite.com, etc. pointing to each Google app.

So far I have number 1 and number 3 working correctly by pointing the main A record of the domain to the IP provided by Tumblr, and creating the proper CNAMEs for Google Apps. I can't figure out what I need to do in order to get the second part working. My assumption was that I would need to create a second A record for the site called "static" and point it to the IP the hosting company provided me, 66.55.44.33 in this example. However, when I do that and go to http://static.mycoolsite.com, all I get is a blank page. But, when I go to http://static.mycoolsite.com/~mycoolsite/static, I get what I want to get.

So what are my options here? Is this even possible under my current configuration? Should I transfer DNS back to my registrar and try to work it all out from there instead? Do I need to mess with subdomains at all? I basically just need to know what to ask my hosting provider or what to tell them to change. HELP!
posted by joshrholloway to Computers & Internet (2 answers total) 1 user marked this as a favorite
 
Your DNS entries are fine if that's what you want. You need to get the webserver settings changed to do what you want. So have your hosting company change the root directory of static.mycoolstie.com to the folder that has the content you want.
posted by advicepig at 11:29 AM on March 15, 2010


For #2, you're going to have to set it up so that going to http://66.55.44.33/ gets you the content that's currently at ~mycoolsite/static. Your DNS already sounds correct. Without knowing more about your setup, it's difficult to comment further about how to do this.

If you have access to the root directory (that is, the web-accessible root directory) of http://66.55.44.33/, one option (assuming linux) would be to create a symlink that points to ~mycoolsite/static. If you have access to the server config itself (e.g., in a VPS environment), you could just change the web-root directory of the server, but I'm guessing you don't. Unfortunately, I'm not very familiar with cPanel, so I can't get you much further.

At this point, this is no longer a dns problem. If all else fails, you could copy content from ~mycoolsite/static to the root directory.
posted by !Jim at 8:40 PM on March 15, 2010


« Older Why is the 5-12 upset so common in the NCAA...   |   What great novel have you read recently? Newer »
This thread is closed to new comments.