How To Run Your Own Name Server With ISPConfig 3 And Fast Hosts

This tutorial shows how you can run your own name server for domains that you register with fasthosts.com. Of course, this works with every other registrar as well, although the procedure might differ a little bit. We will use the ISPConfig 3 server as the primary name server and also acting as the secondary. This may be suited best to a single server setup

To do this, you need one server with ISPConfig 3 installed and a Fast hosts account.

1 Current Situation

Our current situation is as follows: we have

• an ISPConfig 3 server: IP address 93.97.1.4; this one will be our primary name server.
• a fasthosts acccount with the already registered domain prizepalace.co.uk

Our primary name server (ISPConfig server) will be called ns1.prizepalace.co.uk; we will also have ns2.prizepalace.co.uk. Because ns1.prizepalace.co.uk will host the DNS records of its own domain, prizepalace.co.uk, we will have to create a glue record to avoid the hen <-> egg problem.

2 Create The Zone prizepalace.co.uk In ISPConfig

First we log in to ISPConfig and go to the DNS Manager to create the zone prizepalace.co.uk with all desired records (including ns1.prizepalace.co.uk). We click on Add DNS Zone and fill in the form as follows:

You can then click on 'Zones' and the click on the zone you created; 'prizepalace.co.uk'.

You should see some zone records created automatically as below:

Now we need to add an 'A' record for NS1. Click the 'A' icon and complete the fields like this. The IP address is your public IP address.

 Now repeat this for NS2. Again I must stress that we are creating the facade that both name servers are on the same computer.

Now we add some CNAME records for services such mail. Click on 'CNAME' and in the host field write 'pop3'. In the target field I will write mail.prizepalace.co.uk.

Your server is now ready to accept the incoming name server request.

3 Setup Fasthosts

There are two things we need to do with fasthosts; set up the glue  records and ask fasthosts to add our name server to the global registry.

 Log in to your control panel and click 'Configure your domain names'.

Then click the domain name that we've previously been setting up in our ISPConfig 3 control panel. In this case, it's prizepalace.co.uk.

Now, we need to set up the glue records. Click  'Glue Records':

Now we need to add the glue records. Click 'Add Glue Record':

You need to insert 'ns1' in the first fields and then your public IP address in the second field.

Repeat this step again for 'ns2', again in our case using the same public IP.

At the end of it, you MUST contact the domain provider and ask them to add your two name servers to the global registry.

4 hours later....

Allow 72 hours for the changes to propagate and you're ready to add domains to your name server records. Remember to change the name servers for your domains to ns1 and ns2.yournameserver.co.uk; in this case it would:

ns1.prizepalace.co.uk

ns2.prizepalace.co.uk

This howto was based on the original howto for ISPConfig 2 written by Falko Timme found here.