I am 96.4% new to Linux. At my job, I replaced a Linux guru (whom I can no longer contact - bringing me here).

At my job we host internet,email, etc. I have a new agent that has registered a domain name and needs that domain name up on the web. Therein lies my problem. I have no idea how to set the agent up with an ip address, etc. on the dns server. Basically, my question is this:

How do I give the domain names public ip addresses so they can be seen on the web?

All of my DNS settings are configured due to the fact that this server has and is still being used for a vast number of people, I just really don't know where to start.

Any help would be appreciated, and please dumb it down for me

Tee Jay Timms

By "registered" you are implying the domain is already available to the internet. You can verify that by typing:

whois domainname

This will show you a lot of information including:
Which Registrar has it registered.
Which DNS servers it currently points too. (By default most Registrars point to their own DNS servers.)

You can do nslookup (or host or dig) for the domain to see if it resolves to an IP you expect.

It may be the Registrar is actually doing the name resolution rather than your internal DNS servers.

If it is your DNS servers that do the resolution then:
1) The whois needs to show your DNS servers otherwise it won't ever come to them to decide the IP address.
2) You need to setup your DNS to resolve the address from the name (and do a reverse lookup).

For 1 you will have to communicate with the Registrar. Often changes can be done on line but you have to know the login and password. If you don't and don't know who does you'll have to spend time proving who you and your company are before they'll talk to you about it.

For 2 you will need to know what kind of DNS you're doing. Presumably you are running BIND on Linux since you're asking here.
BIND runs a daemon called "named" on the DNS server.
If so you would need to setup a zone file for the new domain along with reverse entries (which can be in the same zone file or in an in.addr.arpa zone file for that purpose). You'd also have to modify named.conf to know about the new zone(s). Most of this is typically somewhere under /etc/named.

I'd recommend finding an existing domain that you know works and do the whois to verify it points at your DNS servers then examine the zone configurations for it. This will give you a lot of clues about how you'd want to set up a new domain.

Thanks jlightner, that cleared a lot up for me. I checked the domainname with the whois command and it pointed to the dns that we own, or so I assume (whois amtgco.com --> ns1.leilogic.com, ns2.leilogic.com --> we own leilogic.com)

I build the websites for the agents and upload them to the net via checkin/checkout on dreamweaver. To do this, I had to have a username and password set for each domain. Before, I would just tell the person i replaced the username and password i wanted for each account and he'd make it.. now it's all up to me (don't get me wrong, i tried to get him to show me his ways.. only to be refused). My next question is this:

Is he actually setting the usernames and passwords for the domains up on the linux server, or is he simply going to a webfront end of, perhaps, the registrar and setting one there?

If he is setting it up on the linux server, how will i do that?

Once again, I apologize for my ignorance with the Linux system!

Tee Jay Timms

Sorry I'm not sure what "dreamweaver" is. Not something I've dealt with. At my site all the web servers are internal. I load the OS on the UNIX/Linux based ones but don't actually manage the Apache or Java that provides the web pages. Most of our web stuff is actually on Windoze boxes so I don't even deal with the OS on those. My interaction is to point the DNS servers (which are BIND running on Linux) to those other servers.

Setting up accounts on UNIX/Linux is fairly simple. You can do it with the useradd command. (Typing "man useradd" will give you details of this command - typing "info useradd" may give you more.)

You can change passwords with the passwd command (again man passwd or info passwd).

These commands exist both on UNIX and Linux but on UNIX there are only man pages - no info pages.

The Registrar is the company that tells the rest of the internet who you are through the "root servers" of the internet. Most of these companies offer other services such as running their own DNS servers so you don't have to run your own, hosting mail servers, web pages etc... but you don't have to do all that. We don't. We only use them to point to our internal DNS servers then use the internal DNS servers to point to our Exchange servers for email and our various other servers for Web pages.

Not saying I don't want to help further but you may get more visibility by posting a new Q that asks about Dreamweaver in the subject. Someone who knows about that may respond with the piece of the puzzle I'm missing. If you do have other questions about DNS or Linux itself I'm willing to help.

Thanks again! Dreamweaver is just a website editor but I'll look further into it.

WYSIWYG editor like Frontpage, Bluefish, Quanta, etc..