How to manage DNS Zones in WHM?

How to manage DNS Zones in WHM?

DNS Zones holds the data that is required by DNS for operating. DNS Zone is a portion of DNS name space by using zones this allows the DNS namespace to be divided up for the administrative reasons.

A DNS zone contains DNS records depending upon which type of DNS zone is created this would determine the kinds of DNS records that can be stored in that zone and also if the records can be modified  DNS zones allows the DNS name space to be divided up for administration and redundancy.

WHM contains a number of tools that allow you to manage your Zone files. They are in the ‘DNS functions’ category of the menu.

Let’s start by adding a new DNS Zone.

Click ‘Add a DNS Zone’, a new interface will appear

Enter an IP address to use for the domain name. Then enter the domain name itself. Finish by choosing which account should own the new domain name. You can also assign the domain to the system, if it shouldn’t belong to any user.

Scroll down. Click ‘Add zone’ to save. The new DNS zone has been created successfully using the standard zone template.

Let’s edit the zone. A new interface will appear.

 Select it from the list.

Scroll down. Hit the ‘Edit’ button since this page is fairly large.

You shouldn’t need to edit anything in this first section of text fields, except for the serial number. This number let’s DNS resolvers know when this record has changed.

In order to generate this number, WHM uses the current year, followed by the current month, the current day and the current hour. Splitting up the serial number shown here, you can see each component.

You should update the serial number in a similar fashion whenever you make changes to this zone.

Scroll down. Here are the DNS records in a zone you are most likely to worry about starting at the top; you have the nameserver (or NS) records. Then the ‘A’ records, which represent the hosts of this DNS Zone, an ‘A’ record points to an IP address as you can see these do at right. Any hostnames should be specified using ‘A’ records as of course should the domain name itself.

Next we have MX records. MX stands for Mail eXchange. Specify all the mail servers for this DNS Zone with a priority number at right. A Zone can have more than one email server with the same priority.

In this case, our zone has one MX record with priority of 0. It’s okay in fact typical, for the MX record for a domain to be the domain itself.

The final type of record in this zone is a CNAME record, CNAME are used to create subdomains, such as mail and www. Enter the domain name in the field at right.

You may have noticed the trailing dot on some of these entries. When entering domain names here, they must be fully qualified. This trailing dot signifies the absolute end of the domain name. Think about it like a windows path in reverse: the dot serves the same functions as c:\does.

When dealing with sub-domains, the desired functionality is to have the rest of your domain name appended onto the end. Since you have entered the domain name at right, the sub domain at left shouldn’t be fully qualified. Not fully qualified…no dot at the end.

Now that you have learned all about the different kinds of records, let’s add a 2 nameservers: –

We will add two nameservers hosts. This number represents the record’s Time To Live – TTL for short. It tells a DNS resolver when to check our nameserver for updates.

Specify a TTL in seconds. The default is 14400 or four hours, but we have changed our default to half that value i.e. 7200

Select Remember –hosts should be ‘A’ records.

Finish by entering an IP for this record.

Now repeat the same steps for a second nameserver host.

Scroll down. Click this checkbox if you want the local mail server to accept mail for this domain even if the primary MX record you indicated does not point to this server. When finished here. Click ‘Save’.

That’s it! The zone file has been modified. Now, let’s delete the zone.

Now use the ‘Delete a DNS zone’ tool: – Select Delete a DNS zone from the list. A new interface will appear.

Note that you can select multiple zones if you wish.

Scroll down. Click delete.

Confirm the deletion. The zone we created has now been removed from the server.

WHM provides you with another way to ‘Edit a zone’s MX records’ click ‘Edit MX entry’.

Choose a domain to edit. Click edit.

Enter a destination mail server changing the priority if you wish.

Add another MX entry field – You can add another MX entry field with this link

Or delete a field as such.

When finished. Click ‘Save’. The domain’s zone file has been updated to reflect the changed MX records.

You now know how to manage the DNS Zones in WHM.

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