Best way to setup DNS server for Plesk + CloudFlare?

November 30, 2014 4.8k views
greglgomez
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greglgomez

I have a droplet running Plesk and I want to allow users to manage their DNS zone purely from the control panel with changes propagated to CloudFlare automatically via the Plesk extension.

From my understanding, to achieve this I need to run my own DNS server. I've had a look over the Branded name server instructions here and it looks like I need to setup another droplet to act as a secondary DNS server to achieve what I want.

To be frank running another droplet for a DNS server seems a little overkill for my needs, but I would still like the convenience of keeping DNS in the Plesk control panel and integrated with CloudFlare.

So my questions are:

  1. Are there any other options?

  2. If not, what is the best way to setup a DNS slave server for Plesk?

  3. Is it potentially possible to offload the DNS duties to Route 53 so I don't have to run my own DNS servers and still have the domains integrated with the CloudFlare extension?

I hope I've made myself clear enough. :)

Thanks in advance for the help,
Greg.

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1 Answer
Florinilinescu January 12, 2015

Hello Greg,

I have the same question! My concern was that all the content (even Plesk Admin) was routed through cloudflare after changing the NS settings with my registrar to the new nameservers provided by cloudflare.

That did not seem to be the ideal "workaround" for me and I reached out to CloudFlare support.

Their reply was: "Where is the actual issue? There should not be a problem if your Panel goes through CloudFlare"

Well there would be an issue when you realise that after changing the NS to CloudFlare you cannot access some areas of Plesk Admin, for example.

What I did not try was to change the DNS entry in DO Panel for my domain name for the "www" entry to the one suggested by Plesk running BIND.

You might want to give that a shot.

Enable BIND component in Plesk.
Check the DNS settings for the domain that you want to have CloudFlare support.(settings that do not work OOTB as you do not run your own DNS server).
You will notice that the entry for WWW will change to something like domainname.**.cloudflare.com instead of domainname.com.
Change that entry in DO Panel in the corresponding box.

I hope this helps.

PS: I am just trying to enable CloudFlare without routing everything on my VPS through CloudFlare.

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