Help on webserver setup
 

hi,

i'm a newbie at web admin and my really need your help guys on web server setup and installation. you see my boss just assigned mo do these task and don't have that much idea.. i do have some basic knowledge on linux installation etc.., but there is this problem that i cant solve.

This is the problem:

We have an old website which is managed on our office server using the public IP provided to us by the ISP. The old administrator just vanished and i was tasked to retrieve all the data on the website. The problem is, there is no password. So what i wanted to do is take down the site temporarily and setup an "under maintenance" site. The problem is, everytime i change the PC/server for the temporary site, the website's domain name is only accessible only for 1 day. After that you can't access the website using its domain name but only by its IP address. So for example after i change the PC the website "example.org" is accessible through its domain name, after the next day, you could only access the site through its IP address.

I'm using ubuntu for the temporary server and the old server is run on fedora.

My initial suspect is i need DNS setup. I used nmap and detected the old server has DNS. I already have setup bind9 but still it doesnt work.

does a webserver need a DNS server installed?(i mean for private servers) is this required?


thank you very much for your help..

If the old server on Fedora is working, just leave it alone on the public internet.

Copy everything you need onto the new server and only have that server visible from within the private LAN.
For dev/testing purposes on the new server, just add eg _dev to the domain names and only have those available on the internal LAN DNS.
In fact, better is to only add them to your personal machine hosts file; that way no-one else can play with it whilst you are dev/testing.
DNS is not required in this case.

The public DNS is likely hosted elsewhere eg your ISP and will be updated regularly (eg daily ... hint) by them.

Incidentally, as this is for a work server, make sure you sue the LTS version of Ubuntu.
Note that Fedora was a really bad choice; that's the RH bleeding edge R&D distro; definitely not recommended for a work server.
Better would have been Centos (free version of RHEL).

You'll find this site full of free to read manuals/books www.linuxtopia.org

We will get rid of the old server pc so we definitely need to remove the physical server. What confuses me is why the Domain name is not accessible after 1 day if the old physical server is replaced. you encountered this kind of issue before?