Hostname issues

[wbcbu]

Hello there! I'm new and wanted to see if anyone could give me a hand. I'm a web developer tasked with doing some basic dedicated server management for a client (they employ a network team that have no experience with LAMP). The dedicated server kept sending me DNS errors related to the lack of a FQDN hostname (which was an arbitrary automatically assigned hostname from the provider).

The main domain for the client has DNS centrally hosted outside of the provider, and I had the network team create me an A record of xyz.clientdomain.com to point to the IP address of the server. However, when I changed the hostname to xyz.clientdomain.com and added the A record entry within WHM, I attempted to access one of the domains on the server and it pointed to a cPanel/WHM 404 page. If I switched the hostname back to the one that was initially provided, the domains work again.

Bottom line: what am I doing wrong? Do I need to contact the hosting provider for assistance? Thanks in advance!

Server Specs:
Intel Xeon E3-1220L 2.2GHz
8GB RAM
500GB HDD
RHEL 6.3 x86_64 standard
cPanel/WHM 11.34.1 (build 6)

 

[CraftyPanda]

Hi,

Try setting up a new account on your server with the domain your are using as the host name. The server will then have a local DNS look up.

Andy

 

[wbcbu]

Hi,

Try setting up a new account on your server with the domain your are using as the host name. The server will then have a local DNS look up.

Andy

Thanks for the suggestion Andy. However, I attempted to create an account of xyz.clientdomain.com from within WHM, and it gave me this error:

Account Creation Status: failed

Sorry, a DNS entry for xyz.clientdomain.com already exists, please delete it first (from all servers in the DNS cluster).

Is it safe to do this?

 

[quietFinn]

The main domain for the client has DNS centrally hosted outside of the provider, and I had the network team create me an A record of xyz.clientdomain.com to point to the IP address of the server.

If the DNS zone of clientdomain.com is not hosted in your server, then you should delete the DNS zone for xyz.clientdomain.com in your WHM.
Do NOT try to add an A record for the hostname xyz.clientdomain.com in your WHM, it already exists.

Do this in SSH command prompt:

/scripts/ipcheck --verbose

it will tell if there are any IP-related problems.

 

[CraftyPanda]

If the DNS zone of clientdomain.com is not hosted in your server, then you should delete the DNS zone for xyz.clientdomain.com in your WHM.
Do NOT try to add an A record for the hostname xyz.clientdomain.com in your WHM, it already exists.

Do this in SSH command prompt:

/scripts/ipcheck --verbose

it will tell if there are any IP-related problems.

I thought you had to have the domain you want to use as your host name on your local server as an account? Am i wrong about this?

 

[quietFinn]

I thought you had to have the domain you want to use as your host name on your local server as an account? Am i wrong about this?

Yes you are wrong.
You have a domain, let's say somedomain.com, and you can have many hostnames, like server1.somedomain.com, server2.somedomain.com, etc., but the DNS zone for the domain somedomain.com is hosted wherever you want. You just make sure that you have A records for all the hostnames in the DNS zone of somedomain.com.