TurnKey Domain management & Dynamic DNS

I'm a recent windowpro-turned-linuxnoob.  I also know very little about running servers on my old computers.  I'm a little overwhelmed by the options, names, accounts, and basically everything outside of the video tutorial showing how to make a virtualbox server.  I'm at a point where I've got my Joomla server up and running, but I'm stuck at, "What now?".

I've signed up with the hub, but I'm not sure that I've signed up to the right part of it.  There are some areas where it's like "enable storage" and "enable turnkey", and I'm reluctant to do so because I'm not really sure what I'm signing up for, or what's going to run and cost me money without my knowing.

I've been enjoying Linux up to this point, but I've been at this impasse for about 4 days now with off-and-on searching for an answer to my questions.

I'm bracing for the impact of "search the forums, n00b" or something like that, and though I've used the search function, I'm not sure I even know enough to know what keywords I should look for.

I promise I wouldn't have posted if I hadn't tried to figure it out on my own.

Thanks in advance for any help!

Nzoe

And create your subdomain eg mydomain so the address you will need to browse to is mydomain.tklapp.com

Sometimes it takes a moment for it to propogate through to the DNS you are using. If after 5 minutes or so it still doesn't work perhaps try using an alternative DNS (I have found google's to be quite good, the IP is 8.8.8.8).

If so then that should be fine. At my work we use Google Apps for email (and gCal/gDocs/etc) and have our website (same domain) hosted elsewhere and it all works fine.

Again TKL basically only supply a front end for the Amazon service. Here's the AWS Route53 (DNS) pricing page.

It's certainly silly to be paying twice for something! If you wish to have your DNS handled by the Hub then you can cancel other services offered by your existing host. Obviously you'll wnat to keep the domain though!

1) AFAIK you are right, cron.hourly would suggest that it runs every hour (although I still consider myself a Linux newb - despite using it for a few years now). To confirm I would consult google! (Just remember that TKL v11.x is based on Ubuntu 10.04/Lucid and you will find masses of info). Cron jobs can be run as regularly as you desire - although I don't know what unintended consequence that may cause. Perhaps you could trial it and/or do a bit more research around that. Remember that the Hub DNS is just a front-end for AWS Route53.

2) I can't say too much because I'm not 100% sure on 1 (above) but assuming my answer is correct there, then it may be that your site may become unreachable under those circumstance (until the IP is updated). I have a static IP so I can't comment or test this. Maybe test it and see (tklapp.com costs nothing).

3) My personal experience with DynDNS hasn't been all positive, especially when coupled with the 'auto' DDNS router feature (mine stopped working for no apparent reason on a number of occasions and eventually stopped working altogether). Although in fairness it wasn't really DynDNS's fault. Personally I would never again trust something as important as updating the IP of an important server to a cheap piece of consumer grade hardware. I ended up using an alternate dynamic DNS provider but have found native Linux clients for alternative providers (especially for headless servers) difficult to configure. Finally I forked out the AU$10/mth for an upgrade to my internet plan (which gave me a static IP and also includes other goodies). I haven't had any such issues since!

When your IP changes it involves your internet connection being disconnected and then reconnected again (so you will briefly lose contact anyway, your IP will update whenever you dissconnect manually, otherwise ISPs usually do it at night every few days to a week - at least in my experience). Also in my experience, most internet plans that have dynamic IPs also have a clause in the agreement that you are not permitted to run a publicly available server (different ISPs have different levels of strictness on this, some say not server at all, some say no commercial server, some go as far as to block ports, etc). Obviously most ISPs don't police this much, and I'm certainly not preaching to you - but it could be worth considering - especially if you are running some sort of commercial site. Having your internet connection cut with no notice (and perhaps up to a week for a new provider to connect) certainly won't be a good thing. Most ISPs charge very little for a static IP (as I said above mine charges an extra $10/mth - which is tax deductable anyway, and includes other extras) and then all this becomes a non issue.

You need to set the nameservers to point to Amazon (with your domain name registrar). Have you done that? If not please do so. If so then check to see that they are correct and perhaps contact your domain registrar to find out what the holdup is. I nmy experience it has only taken an hour or 2 but YMMV and some registrars state that it can take "up to 24 hrs" - so perhaps check their documentation.

The DNS trickery built into the Hub should allow that as it works for dynamic IPs. So in theory it should be fine. But I haven't tested it so can't say for sure. You could always set up a test server with a tklapp.com domain and check that it works but I can't see why it wouldn't.

In my experience, ISPs are often guilty of configuring their DNS servers to ignore TTL and cache results for extended periods. A similar thing can sometimes happen on corporate networks where an internal DNS server is used (and hasn't been configured ideally). Generally that is done to reduce network load.

To ensure that HubDNS mappings update as quickly as possible, make sure that the TTL is set to the minimum possible (10 seconds) and that you are using a well configured public DNS provider. Personally I use Google Public DNS (8.8.8.8) and it rarely ever takes any more than 5 minutes for an updated HubDNS domain to propagate.

If you are in a particular rush, you can use AWS nameservers and the change should be almost instant (~10 seconds). Another option is to manually set the domain to IP mapping within your local hosts file. How you do that will depend on your OS, but all support it AFAIK. Please don't forget to remove any manual hosts entries as soon as practical, as it could cause future confusion or issues.

I would suggest that if you plan to host locally, you consider installing a hypervisor so that you can run multiple appliances simultaneously - one for OpenVPN, another for Domain Controller, another for fileserver, with print sharing. The Fileserver will require some manual reconfiguration to join the domain, but otherwise, that should cover most of your desires.

FWIW, in future, I recommend that you start a new thread on our forums. Whilst I monitor all posts on the site, on occasion I miss notifications. If I miss notifications for new forums posts, I'll catch up on them whenever I manually check the forums. Unfortunately, unanswered blog post comments don't show up unless I explicitly check each and every blog post.

Are you using HubDNS with multiple domains? I recall that did sometimes cause some issues (TBH, I'm still not 100% sure what the issue is/was, but I worked around it by using CNAME records for everything but the main domain).

Failing that, I'm not really sure. I assume that you must have already linked to a valid Hub account as otherwise the initialiaztion would fail.

Perhaps it's worth manually deleting the existing mapping within the Hub, and rerun the update? If that still fails, perhaps try reinitializing (and rerun update afterwards) too?

Please let me know how you go. If you don't get a timely response, it's perhaps best to open a thread on the forums. Or please feel free to bump your post (so long as they are just bumps with no additional info, I'll clean them up when I respond).