ServerBuddies Support Blog

How to set up one domain to be your DNS in Plesk

You must first have the domain you wish to make your DNS already set up in Plesk. You will also need at least 2 IP’s to use for your server. For reference, in this article ’serverbuddies.com’ will refer to the domain name you are using. Make sure to replace this with your actual domain name.

1. Log into your Plesk control panel as Administrator and select the domain from the Domains list you wish to make DNS.
2. Select the DNS icon from your services list.
3. Select the link serverbuddies.com from the Host list, with Record Type NS and Value ns.serverbuddies.com
4. In the Enter nameserver field change the ns.serverbuddies.com to ns1.serverbuddies.com and select OK.
5. From the Tools area select Add Record. For Record type select NS and enter ns2.serverbuddies.com in the Enter nameserver field and select OK.
6. Select from your host list ns.serverbuddies.com with Record type A and change the value to ns1 and select OK.
7. From the Tools area select Add Record again. For Record type leave as A, in the Enter domain name add ns2, in the Enter IP address enter your second IP address that you are going to use and select OK.
8. You should now have 2 Record types with the NS value of ns1.serverbuddies.com and ns2.serverbuddies.com and under the Host list you will also have ns1.serverbuddies.com and ns2.serverbuddies.com with the Record type of A and they will have 2 separate IP’s.

In order to have these added as DNS values for when you add new domains you will need to change the default DNS record in Plesk.

1. Select Server from the list on your left.
2. Select the DNS icon from the Services list.
3. From the Host list select with record type NS and enter ns1.serverbuddies.com in the Enter nameserver field and select OK.
4. From the Tools area select Add New Record. Change the Record type to NS and in the Enter nameserver field input ns2.serverbuddies.com and select OK.

If you want to use 2 separate domains for your DNS this is even easier, because Plesk has already created this for you. You must have 2 domains entered in Plesk and assigned separate IP’s. You would then only need to create a DNS zone template the same way described earlier, only inputting ns1.serverbuddies.com and ns2.serverbuddies.com for your default values.

Reference: http://parallels.com/

Domain zone files

Here is an example for a domain file for yourdomain.com. Please note this is a very generic example and there are more features to it. Please refer to the BIND documentation for help with these features.

Any line starting with a ; is a comment line and is ignored by BIND. The first 6 lines are configuration lines for the zone. These lines tell it what the zone is (yourdomain.com) who is responsible for it (root.yourdomain.com which is equivalent to root@yourdomain.com) and a few other things. These other things include a serial number used for keeping track of when it’s updated, how often to refresh the database, how often to retry a zone transfer, when the zone information will expire and a default time to live. *IMPORTANT* Whenever you make changes to the zone file, you MUST increment the serial number. If you do not do this, prolems can occur, especially if you are a primary server supplying information to secondary sites. Most of this information is only used if you have both master and slave systems

The next two lines tell it who the primary DNS server is and who should get the mail for this domain. You can have multiple listings of each of these. To add more dns servers just repeat exactly what is listed changing the dns.yourdomain.com with another dns server. To add another mail server you do the same thing except you have an extra field. The “10″ in the MX line states a priority, lower number being first. What this means is if you have 2 MX listings, one is 10 and one is 20, it will try to deliver the mail to the MX listing with the 10 priority and if it fails it will then go to the MX listing with the 20 priority.

The rest of the zone file lists all your hosts and ips.

Removing a default domain from one of your IP addresses in Plesk

Once you have set a domain to be the default domain for a specific IP address in Plesk, you will not be able to deselect that particular domain. At this point you only have the option of switching the IP address to another domain on your server.

If you would like to do this there is a solution using MySQL commands. You can manually set the default_domain_id to zero for a specific IP address directly in the Plesk database. Make sure to replace IPADDRESS with your address.

The following command will remove the default domain setting for all IP addresses:

Then you need to use the command ‘websrvmng’ to apply changes:

Reference: http://parallels.com/

What is the difference between Domain disk space and Hard disk quota?

Domain disk space - a calculation of everything the domain uses disk space for i.e. web, mail, databases, etc.
Hard disk quota - a calculation of disk space used by a domains ftp user account i.e. web files.

Domain disk space
This is how much disk space is used by the entire domain. It is made up of Plesk statistics and includes the amount of disk space taken by web pages, mail accounts, databases and other domain data including options specified in the statistic settings on Server -> Server preferences page in the Plesk CP.

Hard disk quota
Is a file system feature that limits how much disk space can be taken by the files which are owned by a specific system account (either domain FTP user or webuser or subdomain FTP user).

This file system quota cannot be exceeded. If the limit is reached, the system user will not be able to create new files and will receive the error “no more space left on device”.

Reference : http://parallels.com

How to check if Perl script engine is enabled and working for a domain?

To check this we can use a simple script like this:

#!/usr/bin/perl
print “content-type:text/html\n\n”;
print “<html>\n”;
print “<head />\n”;
print “<body>\n”;
print “Hello World!\n”;
print “</body>\n”;
print “</html>\n”;
#

Save the content into a text file and save in the domain web-accessible folder (like $HTTPD_VHOSTS_D/domain.tld/httpdocs) on the server with .pl extension (test.pl for example). Then try to open the file via browser by the http://domain.tld/test.pl URL. The domain name should be resolved for this to work.

The test looks successful if a page shows the “Hello World!” string.

If an error or full script listing is visible, it means that Perl script engine is not configured for the domain properly.