Help solve my DNS woes

February 25, 2008 10:57 AM

Help me figure out this DNS problem with my website...

My friend has a VPS, and has very kindly offered to host my website. So far I have copied over my entire home folder from my old host (through Cpanel) to his server. I can successfully access it when point my browser to the new server's IP address (http://208.79.232.248/~crumb). I also changed the name servers over, and this change is reflected when I do a whois search for my domain. But something seems to be amiss, because when I go to my domain (crumb.cc), nothing loads. When I use Cpanel's Network Tools to check the domain, I get an "Host crumb.cc not found: 2(SERVFAIL)" error message. It seems like the name is just not connecting with the new IP address, despite the fact that I have changed the name servers and that Cpanel even lists "crumb.cc" as the main domain.

Is there something obvious that we should check? What could be the problem? Neither my friend know much about how DNS and name servers work. Also, my registrar is GoDaddy, if it makes any difference.

posted by puffin to computers & internet (12 comments total)

When did you change the name servers? It takes time to propagate.
posted by nitsuj at 11:08 AM on February 25, 2008

Also, did your friend give the domain a zonefile on the new VPS?
posted by nitsuj at 11:10 AM on February 25, 2008

Try DNSReport and see what it says (free).
posted by XMLicious at 11:11 AM on February 25, 2008

The nameservers listed in the whois record are not serving answering for crumb.cc. You will have to look around in Cpanel and find out where the section on name serving is. Then, you will have to add various entries (such as an A record for www.crumb.cc) and the IP address of the server hosting the page.


Whois lists:
NS1.TETTO.ORG
NS2.TETTO.ORG

[root@service1 ~]# host -t any crumb.cc ns1.tetto.org
Using domain server:
Name: ns1.tetto.org
Address: 208.79.232.248#53
Aliases:

Host crumb.cc not found: 2(SERVFAIL)
posted by ydnagaj at 11:15 AM on February 25, 2008

nitsuj: I changed name servers yesterday around 9am EST. I think it has propagated, because yesterday I could still connect to my site, it was just the version on the old server and not my friend's server. (I might not have made it clear before -- I already had the domain hosted by a commercial hosting service for a few years before just now deciding to move it to my friend's server, so I was just changing the name servers, not entering them for the first time.) Today nothing is loading at all. I assume if it hadn't propagated yet the domain name would still be loading the old version of the site.

I'll ask him about the zonefile, it's possible he hasn't done this.
posted by puffin at 11:15 AM on February 25, 2008

According to whois your domain servers are NS1.TETTO.ORG and NS2.TETTO.ORG; however, those servers aren't responding with anything for the zone crumb.cc. If these are your friend's servers you will probably need to ask him to set up the zone for you.
posted by douglaswth at 11:16 AM on February 25, 2008

When you said you "changed the name servers over", what exactly did you do? Did you transfer hosting of your DNS to another server? Changing the nameservers doesn't do any good if those servers don't have zone files for your domain.

According to your whois records, the authoritative nameservers for crumb.cc are ns1.tetto.org and ns2.tetto.org. When queried with nslookup, though, neither server seems to know anything about the domain.

You will need to create a zone file on one of these nameservers for your domain. If you have the zone file from the previous nameservers, you can use that with some minor changes.

A zone file looks something like this.
posted by me & my monkey at 11:17 AM on February 25, 2008

What nitsuj said. I did a dns lookup and don't see the records yet.
posted by white_devil at 11:17 AM on February 25, 2008

Your domain is set up properly, but the VPS (208.79.232.248, aka ns1.tetto.org in this context) is unable to answer queries for it. It's returning a "Server Failure" (SERVFAIL) error, which means that it thinks it should be able to answer for that domain, but it can't because of some misconfiguration. I'm betting the DNS on your friend's VPS for crumb.cc is partially configured, but if you check the whole configuration you'll probably find that some piece is missing, likely a zonefile as others have mentioned.
posted by pocams at 11:19 AM on February 25, 2008

When you said you "changed the name servers over", what exactly did you do?
You guessed right, all I did was change them in the GoDaddy control panel. It sounds like a missing zone file could be the problem.
posted by puffin at 11:23 AM on February 25, 2008

Right. If you've got access to edit the zonefile from your control panel, you'll need to add entries for crumb.cc and www.crumb.cc that point to your VPS IP address. I'm not familiar with Cpanel and I don't know what your access rights are on the VPS, so I can't give you any further guidance here. Your friend may need to help you out or do this for you.

Alternately, you can use a free 3rd party DNS provider, like everydns.net or pmsdns.org. Create records that point crumb.cc to your IP address, then change your domain's nameservers so they point to (for example) ns1.pmsdns.org and ns2.pmsdns.org.
posted by brain at 3:23 PM on February 25, 2008

Setting up the zone file did the trick. Thank you everyone!
posted by puffin at 5:36 PM on February 25, 2008