Re-start DNS services

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paulb

New Member
Hi,

Yesterday all websites on my VPS went offline for a couple of hours, but on investigation I did notice that they could be accessed via http:// ... ip address .. /~accountname. So I assumed that something had gone wrong with DNS services and I re-started them via WHM with root access.

That all worked fine straight away and was very easy to fix. However I am totally confused as to why this would happen, as all was fine a few hours earlier. I would like to understand if there is something I need to do to ensure this does not happen again as it has also happened before.

Can anyone enlighten me with a possible cause as well as a possible means to prevent it in the future. I have googled around but cannot fine anything meaningful (at least with my search terms).

Thanks for your help.
PaulB
 
Hi PaulB,


Did you receive notification about the problem? It kind of sounds like you didn't so here is how you should be able to set that up. Go to Server Contacts | Contact Manager. Under the box for Alert Contact Priority Assignment is a link to Change Alert Destinations. Put your information in there such as your email address and if you like even your cell phone's email texting address (for instance #@messaging.sprintpcs.com). I will have mine set to email on Low and to text (on the list as Pager) on high and then ICQ and AIM are disabled.

Below that you'll see the box for Alert Priority Assignment I don't believe that I changed anything in here but if you want to turn off or disable alerts for certain things this is where you would do it.

After configuring this you should receive alerts when a service goes down or the server needs attention.

As far as which nameserver you're using I assume that it's Bind? You could use NSD too but I've found Bind to be extremely reliable and have never seen a problem with it.

Now as to how to determine what actually went wrong this would require digging into log files. That might be tough at this point since some time has obviously passed since the last problem but using SSH you would look in the /var/messages log file. At least that's where I see messages related to named on my system :)

Hope that helps!
 
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