Topic: Domain problem

[Rick]

Here is the situation:

I have a domain name hosted on a hosting provider (www.domainname.com)
All the email is going there to a catch-all email address. I pick up the email there with my e-smith box. So far so good.

There is a problem when I want to take a look or update my primary website witch is hosted on the hosting provider I mentioned above. I set up my e-smith box with domainname.com so when I want to take a look at www.domainname.com I see the e-smith primary website instead of my website at the hosting provider.

How can I solve this problem?

I am afraid when I use some other domain name on my e-smith box, then my email will not go in to the correct mailboxes on my LAN.

[Jason Miller]

If you are running 4.1/4.1.1 you should check out the hostnames and addresses section of the e-smith manual:

http://www.e-smith.org/docs/manual/4.1/admin-hostnames.html

This panel controls you local DNS lookups.

Regards,

Jay

[Rick]

I deleted the WWW entry, but nothing happens. I still get the primary website fron the box, and not the Internet.

[Jason Miller]

Don't delete it.  www (along with other hostnames) are required.  Currently the software just doesn't allow them to be deleted [the development versions we are working on will prompt to inform you that you cannot delete it].

Instead, modify the hostname value.

What is the external ip of the hosting domain (www.domainname.com)?

Put that value in as the modified 'www', and if that fails, create a new hostname of 'www.domainname.com' pointing to your hosting site's external ip.

Regards,

Jay

[Charlie Brady]

Jason Miller wrote:
 
> Don't delete it.  www (along with other hostnames) are
> required.  Currently the software just doesn't allow them to
> be deleted [the development versions we are working on will
> prompt to inform you that you cannot delete it].

And even if the software did allow you to delete "www", that wouldn't help you, you'd only get a "no such address" response. You don't want to delete that name, you want to change the IP address that it corresponds to. That's why you should modify "www", rather than delete it.

You have another option, which is to add a "local domain prefix", which renames your local network from *.domain.com to *.prefix.domain.com. This was the standard configuration (with "prefix" set to "e-smith") prior to version 4.1, and it was there to prevent the problem that you are having. But we had many requests to remove that feature.

You can set a local domain prefix by doing:

/sbin/e-smith/db configuration set LocalDomainPrefix prefix.
/sbin/e-smith/signal-event post-upgrade
/sbin/e-smith/signal-event reboot

Notice the trailing period in "prefix." - it is required.

If you choose this route, you will probably need to reconfigure mail clients and browsers on your workstations.

Regards

Charlie

[Rick]

Thanks very much for the quick responses. I changed the IP address of the www entry in the hosts and addresses setup to the external IP of the hosting domain. That did the trick.

The other solution (domainprefix) could that also be a solution for this situation:

provider: dowmainname.com
Owner of e-smith box has no domainname which he owns, so he installed the e-smith box as domainname.com

All the email he sends to someuser@domainname.com is not going outside his LAN now.

I guess the domainprefix could be the solution to this one?

[Allun]

Hi,

i had the exact same problem, however i had to set the e-smith box's name as "prefix.domainname.com" because my ISP where the internet site is hosted hosts several sites on the same server as virtual sites, and they tell me that there's no IP address or path they can give me apart from www.domainname.com.


does this sound right?

[Geoff Bennion]

Well, it could be right,
It is posible to virtual host with a range of valid IP's ( redundancy )
Or, more likely they don't want the support issue if they change their IP address.....
What you could do is this :

E-Smith Console - Login as root

nslookup
server 212.15.64.11
www.domainname.com


This should give you the IP address of your webserver on your ISP.
(The IP address is a valid DNS server which I use for such these purposes....)

If you have no joy, you could always try using whois.

Geoff Bennion