Topic: DNS partially functional

[gabby]

Hello all...I've been scratching my head with this one for a couple weeks now. I'm not finding anything really related in the forums or manual, so I thought I would give a new topic a try...

First some background...
I have administered an SME 7.x (currently 7.5.1) server in my father's home for several years with few major issues. It was configured in servergateway mode and hosted our family's domain (webserver + email).

My father recently relocated across the country, taking the server with him. Rather than go without email for 1 week+ we set up my new server with SME 8 to host the primary domain.

Now that my father has internet access, we have been trying to bring his system up in servergatewayprivate mode and have changed the primary domain name to avoid conflicts with the primary domain name on my server in the DNS records.

My father's network has partial access to the internet. The clients in his local network can access some websites and not others. Web browsers (Safari and IE) state that they "cannot find the server". When my father pings the external server by IP address he gets a response. When he pings the external server by hostname, it fails. He has tried this from WinXP, Win Vista and Win7 clients and logged into SME as 'root'.

Thinking we have a DNS issue, we have reset the DNS cache using (from thread http://forums.contribs.org/index.php?topic=48383.0):

Code: [Select]

config delete dnscache
config delete dnscache.forwarder
signal-event post-upgrade; signal-event reboot
[\code]

This did not resolve the issue.

Even though we have been administering this server for several years, we are still fairly novice at SME administration, we don't know where else to go or what else to do.

We are hoping to have both servers go live under the same domain in the future. If someone know how to do this, we would rather do it now than later.

[janet]

gabby

we have been trying to bring his system up in servergatewayprivate mode and have changed the primary domain name to avoid conflicts with the primary domain name on my server in the DNS records.

sme does not have that mode, please explain more accurately.
What changes did you do to what DNS records and where ?

We are hoping to have both servers go live under the same domain in the future. If someone know how to do this, we would rather do it now than later.

You can not host the same domain name on different servers & expect name resolution to be consistent or even to work correctly at all.. Why not just go back to the way both servers were  originally configured, as it seems you have done some incorrect or inappropriate configuration at one or both ends.

[gabby]

mary,

sme does not have that mode, please explain more accurately.

SME does have a private server and gateway mode, set in the server console. This mode enables the server to act as a gateway without a public webserver interface.

What changes did you do to what DNS records and where ?

The only change made to the DNS records was to point the "A records" for domainname.org and mail.domainname.org at my ip address. With that set, dyndns now does its job of reconfiguring the ip address when my ISP changes my ip address.

Why not just go back to the way both servers were  originally configured

Previously, my server was not in service. This is a brand new system. Whether the SME7 box (my father's) hosts our domain or my SME8 box hosts the domain, we still have to figure out how to get both systems up to serve as gateways for our separate networks. We would prefer to find a way that doesn't involve registering a brand new domain.

Bringing the SME7 box back up, we made two changes:
1. change from servergateway to servergateway private mode and
2. change the primary domain name from domainname.org to domainnamexy.org

Thanks.

[gabby]

mary,

Thank you for taking the time to respond. It would appear that the cable modem wasn't forwarding the DNS information to SME. We added the ISP's DNS server addresses to the secondary (Corporate) DNS Settings on the Domains tab of server-manager.

One reboot everything instantly started working. The internet connection test passed and all inaccessible websites became available.

thank you again.

[janet]

gabby

SME does have a private server and gateway mode, set in the server console

Yes I am well aware of the Private mode, it's just the name you used ie
"we have been trying to bring his system up in servergatewayprivate mode"
did not sound familiar to me.
I note that it is more accurately called
Private server and gateway mode

Anyway you fixed the problem, which was a user misconfiguration issue rather than a sme server issue.