How to Use MyDNS-NG with cPanel & WHM

Overview

MyDNS-NG is DNS server software for Linux servers.

MyDNS-NG uses a database to store the server's DNS zone files. This makes MyDNS-NG an efficient nameserver for servers or clusters that need to store large numbers (hundreds of thousands) of zone records.

Requirements For MyDNS-NG With cPanel & WHM

MyDNS-NG requires the following to run on your cPanel & WHM server:

• cPanel & WHM version 11.32 or later
• MySQL 5.0 or later — PostgreSQL support is not yet available.
• BIND — MyDNS-NG does not remove BIND from the system. BIND is a base requirement of cPanel & WHM.

Note: MyDNS-NG does not support Domain Name System Security Extensions (DNSSEC).

How to Install MyDNS-NG

Currently, you cannot install MyDNS-NG by default during the cPanel & WHM installation process.

To install MyDNS-NG via WHM, navigate to the Home >> Service Configuration >> Nameserver Selection screen and do the following:

1. Select MyDNS.
2. Click Save.

To install MyDNS-NG via the command line, run the following command as the root user:

/scripts/setupnameserver mydns 

After you install MyDNS-NG, the system will keep the zone files in /var/named in sync with the records in the MyDNS database.

If you change to a different DNS server and then change back to MyDNS-NG, you must run a forced DNS import and restart MyDNS to import any changes:. To perform the import and restart MyDNS, run the following via the command line as the root user:

/scripts/importmydnsdb --force
/scripts/restartsrv_mydns

Note: You should ait for an email confirmation that the importmydnsdb --force command has finished before you restart myDNS.

How to Use MyDNS-NG With a Dedicated MySQL Server

cPanel & WHM's implementation of MyDNS-NG will work with a remote, dedicated MySQL server. You can navigate to the Home >> SQL Services >> Setup Remote MySQL server screen in WHM to set up the connection to the remote MySQL server.

When you run MyDNS-NG on a dedicated MySQL server, each connected web server will maintain its own unique database of zone files. The MySQL server will retrieve these zone files from the web servers, rather than retaining a central copy of them.

How to Manage and Troubleshoot MyDNS-NG

On your server, MyDNS-NG is installed in the /usr/local/cpanel/3rdparty directory.

Each web server connected to MyDNS-NG has its own MySQL database for MyDNS. The web server's database is named according to the format mydns_$hostname, where $hostname represents the server's hostname.

For example, if your server is named server1.example.com, its MyDNS database would be named mydns_server1.

Because MyDNS-NG uses a MySQL database to store zone files, any problem with MySQL will affect MyDNS-NG's performance. If you experience problems using MyDNS-NG, first make sure that MySQL is responsive.

To confirm that MySQL is responsive in WHM, navigate to the Home >> SQL Services >> Show MySQL Processes screen and look for a SHOW PROCESSLIST query.

Or, you can perform the following command via the command line as the root user:

netstat -tap | grep mysql

If MySQL is responsive, you will see a line similar to the following:

tcp        0      0 *:mysql                     *:*                         LISTEN      17280/mysqld

To troubleshoot MyDNS-NG, check the following error logs:

• /usr/local/cpanel/logs/error_log — The WHM error log
• /var/log/messages — The MyDNS error log
• /usr/local/cpanel/logs/dnsadmin_log — The error log for dnsadmin, the WHM process that interacts with DNS zone files

Additional Resurces

• MyDNS-NG