How to create your private nameservers

Prerequisites/Requirements

• VPS installed with CentOS and a web server such as Apache
• Registered domain name
• First, point your domain to a working hosting and create two A records in the Zone Editor, each for your two name servers. Eg ns1.example.com and ns2.example.com. Point each of this A records to your server’s IP. Test to see that when you access the nameservers above, they display the landing page of your VPS. You can also ping them to see if they respond with your server IP.
• In your client area, click on Register Private Nameservers and add the two ns1.example.com and it’s IP and ns2.example.com and it’s IP.
•  Great, now you are ready to create the DNS files.  

Set up DNS zone on your VPS


1. Access the VPS via SSH

ssh user@hostname
2. Install bind and dnsutils, which will allow us to use the dig command later on

Centos or Fedora: yum install bind dnsutils
Ubuntu ir Debian: apt-get install bind9 dnsutils

3. Create a DNS zone file for the domain that will use the name servers. If the domain is called example.com, here is a sample zone file for the domain. The zone file will be called example.com.db. Save this zone file in /var/named. I will assume your server IP is 10.10.10.10. This file will help map your domain name to the IP.

;
; BIND data file for  example.com
;
$TTL    3h
@       IN      SOA     ns1.example.com. admin.example.com. (
                          1        ; Serial
                          3h       ; Refresh after 3 hours
                          1h       ; Retry after 1 hour
                          1w       ; Expire after 1 week
                          1h )     ; Negative caching TTL of 1 day
;
@       IN      NS      ns1.example.com.
@       IN      NS      ns2.example.com.


example.com.    IN      MX      10      mail.example.com.
example.com.    IN      A       10.10.10.10
ns1                     IN      A       10.10.10.10
ns2                     IN      A       10.10.10.10
www                     IN      CNAME   example.com.
mail                    IN      A       10.10.10.10
ftp                     IN      CNAME   example.com.
 
4. Create similar DNS records as above for your two nameservers, ns1.example.com and ns2.example.com Only replace example.com with ns1.example.com and ns2.example.com in the respective files.

5. Configure reverse DNS records. This zone file teaches our nameservers to resolve a host from an IP address. The file will be called  10.10.10.10.db Also, save this zone file in /var/named

;
; BIND reverse data file for 0.10.10.in-addr.arpa
;
$TTL    604800
0.10.10.in-addr.arpa.      IN      SOA     ns1.example.com.
admin.example.com. (
                          1         ; Serial
                          3h       ; Refresh after 3 hours
                          1h       ; Retry after 1 hour
                          1w       ; Expire after 1 week
                          1h )     ; Negative caching TTL of 1 day
;
0.10.10.in-addr.arpa.       IN      NS      ns1.example.com.
0.10.10.in-addr.arpa.       IN      NS      ns2.example.com.
10.10.10.10.in-addr.arpa.   IN      PTR     example.com.

 
6. Update the BIND configuration file. Note that, at this point, you should have these two files ready. Ie

/var/named/example.com.db
/var/named/10.10.10.10.db
Now, simply open the Bind configuration file using your favourite editor.

vim /etc/named.conf

Then add the following code. Remeber to change example.com to your domain name

zone "example.com" {
       type master;
       file "/var/named/example.com.db";
};

zone "0.217.144.in-addr.arpa" {
       type master;
       file "/var/named/10.10.10.10.db";
};
7. Lastly, add an IP address of a stable DNS server in your /etc/resolv.conf file. For example, if you wish to add google’s DNS server, comment our the content of /etc/resolv.conf and add the following line:

nameserver 8.8.4.4

8. Check binds zone files and configuration
 To  check the configuration files run the following command:

named-checkconf

To check a DNS zone files we can use named-checkzone command:

named-checkzone example.com /var/named/example.com.db

zone example.com/IN: loaded serial 1
OK
For the reverse zone file check

named-checkzone 0.10.10.in-addr.arpa /var/named/10.10.10.10.db

zone 0.168.192.in-addr.arpa/IN: loaded serial 2
OK
9. Restart bind

service named restart

10. You can test the bind server configuration using dig command

dig @10.10.10.10 www.example.com

; <<>> DiG 9.6-ESV-R1 <<>> @10.10.10.10 www.example.com
; (1 server found)
;; global options: +cmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<