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Ubuntu server: www not found

Posted on December 31, 2014

I configured my server bind db.mydomain.com with:

mydomain.com. IN MX 10 mail.vumila.com. mydomain.com. IN A 192.192.192.82 www.mydomain.com IN A 192.192.192.82 ns1 IN A 192.192.192.82 ns2 IN A 192.192.192.81 www IN A mydomain.com. www IN CNAME mydomain.com. mail IN A 216.172.176.82 ftp IN CNAME mydomain.com.

It worked for mydomain.com, but not with www.mydomain.com, and when I dig www.mydomain.com I got answer = 0 . What should I do to resolve this?



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@anb1990

As a general rule, A entries are for IP’s while CNAME entries are for hostnames. The bulk of your issues stem from redundancy, as shown below.

mydomain.com.       IN  A       192.192.192.82
www.mydomain.com    IN  A       192.192.192.82
www                 IN  A       mydomain.com.
www                 IN  CNAME   mydomain.com.

Those entries need to be consolidated down to:

www                 IN  CNAME   mydomain.com.
mydomain.com.       IN  A       192.192.192.82

You can even go a step further and create a WildCard entry using * to catch traffic to any sub-domains that do not exist. Essentially, if someone visits sub.mydomain.com and that sub-domain does not exist, traffic will hit mydomain.com.

You can do this by adding one more line to the fixed version above, so it’d look like so:

www                 IN  CNAME   mydomain.com.
*                   IN  A       192.192.192.82
mydomain.com.       IN  A       192.192.192.82

@anb1990

Are you pointing your domain directly to DigitalOcean’s DNS or are you managing this through a domain registrar / web hosting provider? I’ve noticed that changes made here at DO are super-quick, while there’s a larger wait time for changes to fully propagate when I manage the DNS directly through, say, GoDaddy, NameCheap, Name.com etc. Usually it’s by a large enough margin to notice and DO seems to even keep up with Amazon when it comes to resolution and re-resolution.

Also, can you provide us with the domain? I could at least test it from my end (as a non-cached user) to see if I see any issues. Without it, I’m purely guessing until the general wait-time for resolution passes :)

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