Using VPS.NET's DNS Servers with the cPanel DNS Plugin
DNS is something no one likes to play with; it’s messy, you don’t always know of any problems right away, and sometimes, due to propagation, you think you have problems when you really don’t. The only other thing just as fun may be the complicated world of email. Luckily we’ve worked hard to make our DNS system so easy a baby could use it, and have built out a plugin that automatically syncs your cPanel/WHM based server to our DNS system, automating the entire process. There is some setup involved, but I’m here to walk you through it all.
Before we get started, I’ll explain the advantages of using the VPS.NET DNS servers compared to hosting them locally on your machine.
1.) Redundancy – Multiple servers in 13 different cities.
2.) Faster – The server located in the nearest city always responds, decreasing DNS resolution time.
3.) DDOS protected – Your nameservers will be protected from DDOS attacks targetted at taking down your nameservers.
4.) Resource consumption – Your server is no longer handling DNS requests, so there’s more resources to use in other areas.
For our demonstration server, I’m simply running CentOS 5.5 with cPanel/WHM installed. Nothing special.
First step is to login to SSH using the root password provided. Then we can download the cPanel DNS Plugin.
cd /usr/src
wget http://www.vps.net/plugins/vps-net-dns-1.2.2.tgz
tar -xvzf vps-net-dns-1.2.2.tgz
cd vps-net-dns-1.2.2
sh install.sh
That’s all that is necessary to do via command line. The rest of the configuration can be done through cPanel/WHM. Since this is a fresh cPanel server, I’ll also be going through the initial Nameserver/DNS configuration section of cPanel.
The first step of the cPanel/WHM configuration is to setup your resolvers. This is not absolutely necessary, but it’s definitely recommended. We also recommend using the Google DNS servers as resolvers. They’re free, fast and extremely reliable.
Next we can select the nameserver service to use. Since our DNS will be hosted on a completely different server, we can select the disabled option.
Next, input the nameservers you are wishing to use for your domains.
In the next section, cPanel/WHM will ask you if you want to create the A entries for your nameservers and host name. It is not necessary to do it now, so you can skip the section. We will be doing it manually later through the manage my DNS section in the VPS.NET control panel. Upon hitting next, you will be finished with the DNS configuration of your server, however we still need to configure the DNS module.
To configure the DNS plugins, load WHM and scroll to the bottom to the plugins section and then choose the VPS.NET DNS Module. Once loaded, we need to fill the information required to connect to the API. Your VPS.NET username will be the email address you login to the VPS.NET control panel with, and then API key can be generated in the plugin section of the VPS.NET control panel.
After configuration, you will see the DNS Plugin sync up with the VPS.NET DNS servers. The final step is to manually create the A entries for the nameservers and the hostname.
For the nameservers you will want to use the IP address 67.228.254.4 for your primary name server and 67.228.255.5 as your secondary nameserver.
