Have a droplet on a dev team, how do I link the site as a subdomain to the main site?

February 14, 2017 1.6k views
DNS Networking Ubuntu
neuroboticsinc
By:
neuroboticsinc

How do I link the PTR records from a dev account to the main account to the using DNS records in order to link the droplet to a subdomain. I followed this tutorial https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-set-up-and-test-dns-subdomains-with-digitalocean-s-dns-panel . But cannot see anything on my PTR records. Do I need to transfer the droplet from the dev to the other account? If so how?

1 comment
  • marmot7 February 15, 2017

    To make sure I understand the issue, you're saying that another account has the authority for example.com and you want to setup something.example.com?

    If this is the case, then I think you'd need to make the changes in the DNS in the other account as the DNS settings for example.com are there.

    I don't think you have to transfer the droplet to the other account but I do think the DNS change needs to be made in the other account. From there, for example, you could point something.example.com at the IP address of the droplet in the dev account, etc.

    Does that help?

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2 Answers
jtittle1 February 15, 2017

@neuroboticsinc

When you visit Control Panel -> Networking -> PTR Records, the only records that will show are those that link the public IPv4 IP address to a Droplet.

You can't modify your PTR records directly as these are setup when each Droplet is created. You can setup multiple Droplets to gain PTR records for each one though.

For example, using domain.com as the domain.

If I setup 4x Droplets:

d01.domain.com
d02.domain.com
d03.domain.com
d04.domain.com

The above will have a single PTR each. We could change that up a bit as well as use something such as:

d01.web.domain.com
d02.web.domain.com
d03.web.domain.com
d04.web.domain.com

And as above, the PTR records will reflect that.

You would need to make sure you have proper WildCard entries setup for the second example though and that would be something such as:

A          *          DROPLET_IP
A          *.web      DROPLET_IP
A          @          DROPLET_IP

The first entry enables *.domain.com while the second enables *.web.domain.com.

To handle the requests for those DNS records, you'd need to make sure your web server is setup to handle the WildCard.

For example, with NGINX, we'd use something like:

server_name domain.com *.domain.com;

and

server_name web.domain.com *.web.domain.com;

On Apache, we'd use something such as:

ServerName domain.com
ServerAlias *.domain.com

and

ServerName web.domain.com
ServerAlias *.web.domain.com
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  • marmot7 February 15, 2017

    Wouldn't this stuff have to be done in the account that has the domain name zone? I'm relatively new to using DigitalOcean so it's very possible I don't understand how DNS works here yet.

jtittle1 February 15, 2017

@marmot7

It really depends on what you're actually trying to do.

If you need to make changes to the DNS Zone for a domain, and you're using DigitalOcean's DNS, thus managing the DNS from the Networking page of the control panel, then yes, you would make all DNS changes on the account that has the domain.

The PTR record really isn't important unless there's something specific you're trying to do that I'm not understanding. If you're simply trying to manage pointing a domain to an IP, a CNAME to a domain, etc, then the PTR doesn't really matter.

If you'll provide a more concrete example of what you need to do, I'd be more than happy to help. I'm just not too sure of what you're trying to do from the first post.

Reply
  • marmot7 February 15, 2017

    I was trying to contribute to an answer to this one. I don't have this particular problem. I was suggesting to the OP that perhaps authoritative DNS issue was the cause of the problem. I'm going to try to start contributing to this forum but at first I probably won't be all that great at answers but I'll give it a try.

    • jtittle1 February 15, 2017

      @marmot7

      Ah, there should have been another @ mention before the last bit of my previous response as that was more so meant for the OP :-). Time limits prevent editing else I'd go back and edit that now.

      • marmot7 February 15, 2017

        No worries, I'm just learning the ways of you Digital Ocean'ers. I hope I can contribute some useful answers in here, too.

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