First of all hello all, since this is my first post in the forum, I have searched it enough helping my self getting up and running with ISPconfig 3. Excellent job on providing the resources on the site and ISPconfig which is a great project. I am mixed up with certain things on my server. This is the first time that I build one from scratch and in a professional basis, and I would greatly appreciate your assistance. The thing that I am currently mixed up about is the hostname and domain name of my server and its relevance to the actual server. When asked for the hostname of my server at installation (the value that shows up when hostname cmd is issued) I set the name of the domain that would be the first domain hosted on the server. In ISPconfig under the server directive (for example when setting a new website) that value is used (let's say example.com). I went on and set all DNS records manually for the first domain and I face the peculiar issue that when a browser invokes www.example.com is redirected to the correct place but when a browser invokes example.com (without www) is redirected to /var/www/. This is not desired behaviour. I have an A dns record pointing www to my ip in ISPConfig but it does not seems to get resolved correctly. Thanks for your time.
Under the DNS Zone tab do you have Zone (SOA) set to example.com (no www), then an A record under the records tab set to just www (no example.com) and the ip address?
No, under the SOA record for example.com I have two A records, one for example.com. pointing to IP and another for www pointing to the same IP.
Thats not a good idea as neither apache nor postfix will handle this domains. You will have to change the hostname or do not use this domain for websites and email. The hostname must be a subdomain like server1.yourdomain.com as we use it in the installation instructions.
Thanks till for your reply. Is it easy to change it now that I am at my post-install stage?? Should I change it as per instruction for the perfect debian 5.0 setup (it is mentioned in the beggining if I am not wrong). My server is a VPS hosted elsewhere and I dont have physical access to my machine. Should I notify anyone for that change or is irrelevant with their name servers ?
Yes, do that. Also make sure that /etc/postfix/main.cf uses the new hostname. No, just make sure that the hostname exists in DNS.
Thanks for your reply. I don't think I understand what the above sentence means. Could you please elaborate?
The hostname that you want to use has to have a DNS A-Record that resolves to the IP address of your server. Additionally, your IP address should have a PTR Record that resolves to this hostname.
