Help Setting up Secondary DNS

[bgarlock]

Hello,

I have a few questions about setting up RollerNet.us as my secondary DNS service. Here's some background on our setup:

1) domain name is registered with DirectNIC.com
a) Name servers are setup as NS.DOMAIN.COM and NS2.DOMAIN.COM

2) Our webhost provider, is also the PRI DNS (and "Secondary", but not a true secondary which is why I want to get this properly setup with rollernet.us) Both NS.DOMAIN.COM and NS2.DOMAIN.COM resolve to 205.234.xxx.xxx

I would like to use rollernet.us as a true secondary DNS provider. The webhosting is a CentOS 4.8 server, running BIND, and has a WHM/Cpanel front-end.


Questions:

* Do I need to make any changes at my Registrar? or will all the changes be made at my web host provider

* What is the recommended method for making this work the way I need it to?

* What is the best way to *TEST* everything, without breaking anything

Many thanks,

Bruce

[Seth]

Get the Secondary DNS up and running first: you don't need to make any potentially service impacting changes with the registry or your host to do that, other than making them permitted to do an AXFR from your primaries. You can test it by sending queries directly to them with a tool like 'dig', 'host', or 'nslookup'.

Once the secondary is running and verified that it's answering correctly, add them to the list of authoritative name servers at the registry.

[bgarlock]

Looks like I have everything setup properly now. I'm able to dig @208.79.240.3 DOMAIN.COM and get the correct information. I did add them to my registrar's auth. server list, and everything looks fine.

I think I am going to set everything up for a domain name that is not in production, get everything tested and working like I have now for the production servers, then clobber the PRI DNS records for my test domain, and see how the secondary handles things as my test...

Thank You,

Bruce