Topic: Subdomains

[Eric Womack]

Ok, what am I missing.

I own a fully qualified domain name (lets say mydomain.com).  I point this with a great deal of success to it static IP, along with the alias's (www.mydomain.com) using register.com.  Now I want to do a subdomain (sub.mydomain.com) but I cant figure out how to set the DNS records correctly.  I removed the entry that read *.mydomain.com which helped a little since now everything doesn't automaticlly go to the primary web site, but now it doesn't go anywhere.

When I was using a dynamic domain service (the now defunct ODS), I could create all the subdomains I wanted and my e-smith server handled them perfectly.  I had 6 domains (lets say sub1.ods.org, sub2.ods.org etc.) each with their own i-bay, virtual domain and all email being sent to any of them being handled correctly.  So, I know e-smith handles it (and, I might add, well) but what am I doing wrong?

Along the same idea, I want to host another domain (mydomain2.com).  Do I need to do anything special with the DNS records or e-smith to set this correctly?  This all needs to be visiable from the Internet.

[Dan Brown]

So you want www.mydomain.com to go to the e-smith box and sub.mydomain.com to go somewhere else?  If that's the case, removing *.mydomain was correct; now you need to create an A record for sub. pointing to the correct host, and a CNAME record for www. to point it to the e-smith box.

[Eric Womack]

Almost what I want.  I want www.mydomain.com to go to the primary web site of the e-smith box, while www.sub.mydomain.com goes to one virtual domain (with its own i-bay) and www.mydomain2.com goes to another virtual domain (again, with its own i-bay) all on the same box.

I cant understand why this was so easy when I used a dynamic service and so diffucult when I use static settings.  I would expect it to be the other way around.

[Dan Brown]

Then in that case, you didn't need to change your DNS configuration at all.  Reset the *.mydomain.com alias back to mydomain.com, and you should be able to handle the rest within thie virtual domains panel of the e-smith-manager.  If not, it may be a bug.

[Eric Womack]

OK, here is what I found out.  This isn't a bug per se, but it has happened on three seperate machines.

Here is the setup

e-smith 4.0 installed
webmail installed (before it was part of the package ISO)
e-smith upgraded to 4.01

Result

Machine can no longer support multiple domain web hosting via virtual domains using fully qualified domain names.

I have since intalled a fresh 4.1.1 and have had no problems hosting multiple sites with FQD's.  I offer this to the community at large to save someone else the trouble I went through of tracking down what was wrong with the DNS settings.

Eric