Registering New DNS Server in Plesk Expand

You can register a Centralized DNS server in Plesk Expand on the New DNS Server page. To access this page, click the New DNS Server icon on the Centralized DNS page.

Before adding a DNS server to Plesk Expand, there are some preliminary steps that you should take. For details, see Preparing DNS Server for Registration earlier in this section.

To register a new DNS server, perform the following steps:

1. Enter the IP address or hostname for a DNS server.

Note: If you wish to specify the IP address, make sure that this IP address is properly resolved to the corresponding hostname.

2. Specify the TCP/IP port used for connecting to this server. By default, port 8441 is set.

3. Enter the server root password.

4. To install DNSC to this DNS server automatically, select the corresponding checkbox.

Important: For automatic CDNS installation, it is necessary that you have the expand-dist-repository package installed on Plesk Expand machine.

Note: On SuSE or Debian platforms, automatic DNS controller installation may fail (along with operations which require SSH connection). This can be resolved manually. To resolve this issue, you need to allow the 'password' authentication method on your SSH server. To do this, follow these steps:

1. open a terminal to the server Plesk is installed on;

2. open file /etc/ssh/sshd_config

3. find the line:

#PasswordAuthentication no

PasswordAuthentication yes

and change it to

PasswordAuthentication yes

4. If you cannot find the specified line, just add the following line to the file:

PasswordAuthentication yes

5. Restart SSH server by issuing a command:

# /etc/init.d/sshd restart.

This will resolve the SSH connection issue on SuSE and Debian platforms.

5. Set the parameters of the DNS server's SOA record.

Parameter Name	Description	Notes
E-mail	the mailbox of the person responsible for this DNS server.
TTL	"time-to-live": the time, in seconds, this DNS server caches (keeps) a piece of information received from your server before it asks your server again.	If you set the value too low, your server will get loaded down with too many repeat requests. If you set it too high, the information you change will not get distributed in a reasonable amount of time. By default, 86400 seconds (1 day) is set. The solution is as follows: If particular information is not expected to change in the near future, one can have a high TTL (anywhere between a day (86400 seconds) and a week (604800 seconds) If information is known to change soon, it can be transmitted with a low TTL (an hour to a day). It is standard practice to reduce the TTL transmitted with information that is scheduled to change in order to make that change visible rapidly throughout the Internet; once the change has happened, the TTL is increased again.
Refresh	the time interval, in seconds, before which the zones need to be updated.	By default, 10800 (3 hours) is set. A good value here would be 3600 (1 hour).
Retry	the time interval, in seconds, after which the next attemp of refresh should be taken, after a refresh failure.	By default, 3600 (1 hour) is set. A good value here would be 600 (10 minutes).
Expire	the upper limit, in seconds, on the time interval that can elapse before the zones are no longer authoritative	By default, 604800 (7 days) is set. A nice value here would be 3600000 (42 days).
Minimum TTL	the minimum number of seconds to be used for TTL value in RRs.	By default, 86400 (1 day) is set, which is a good value.

Note: If the DNS server is configured to run in Slave mode, it uses the SOA parameters of the Master DNS server is it assigned to. The SOA parameters you set for a Slave DNS server on this page will be ignored.

6. Click OK to add the new DNS server to Plesk Expand.

When a new DNS server is added to Plesk Expand, you can assign a Plesk server, or a number of Plesk servers to it and manage it as desired.