On Thu, 2021-04-15 at 11:00 -0700, Jack Craig wrote:
so my bind config has apparently not worked despite my dig'ing.
an external config checker says it finds no valid IP' for
linuxlighthouse.com, i am failing http challenge.
The DNS records need to be fixed before all else. They need to be held
on a public DNS server that propagates them to the other DNS servers.
Holding them on an isolated server won't do you any good, and
referencing that isolated server within the unavailable record is
compounding the problem.
When I registered my domain name the records were published in the
registrant's DNS servers. While I may set the IPs that are pointing to
my domain name to find my website, and the MX ones for my mail server,
I leave the nameserver (NS) records pointing to the registrant's DNS
servers.
This is the usual way of doing things.
Later on, after changing hosting provider, I transferred the DNS
records to *their* domain servers, too. Again, my www and MX records
point to *my* hosting servers, and the NS records point to the *hosts*
DNS servers.
Usually, the hard work is done for you. When setting up the website,
their system gets you to tell you what name server holds the records,
and their system programs their name server with the data it needs to
hold. Sometimes they screw up, and you have to contact your host and
get them to manually fix things. I've had to do that a few times.
DNS records are like a family tree, they're researched to find your
records, all the records have to be held on public servers. Boiling
this down to a simplistic example - if I want to browse a site like
www.example.com, my system tries to find the IP for it, if it doesn't
already know the answer (*). The approach is to ask the .com root DNS
server *which* DNS server holds records for
example.com, then query
that DNS server for the IP for
www.example.com.
* If, at some stage, your system has looked up a DNS record, it will
cache it for a while (an so can intermediate DNS servers and caching
proxies). If the records change, such as you experimenting, there's a
propagation delay before the changes are noticed elsewhere. This can
be confusing for debugging.
If your plan is for you to run your webserver on your own computer and
for people to connect to it, you have to find out if that's actually
possible with your ISP. Many will forbid it, or their network
structure makes it nearly impossible. And you'll need to be able to
handle all the attacks you'll be under. There probably isn't a website
on the planet that someone isn't trying to exploit.
But you'll need to get your DNS records sorted before you can worry
about trying to get SSL to work, and they'll need to be hosted outside
of your computer.