Domain snafu.

[Down2TheC]

I have a ticket in, but just thought I'd ask here since I'm a bit lost...

We have domain.org in use at the old crappy host. domain.com is registered and forwarding to domain.org. I was thinking I'd get domain.net in with this VPS setup to minimize downtime, so I named everything that way. Now the founder shows up and is ready to point domain.com my way. D'oh! So I have VPS with no domain, and all the wrong names on everything.

1. Just buy domain.net to lesson the PITA.
or
2. point domain.com and have the VPS main domain changed to .com (or doesn't that really matter?)

And just to be clear... If I go to Dotster and tell it ns1.domain.com = xxx.xxx.xxx.2, it registers my DNS and sends domain.com traffic to that IP. If I have another domain going there, how's the box know what domain it's coming in for? (and thus which http home to grab) I'm on the edge of getting this.

[Frank Broughton]

Just have support change your hostname to domain.com

[Down2TheC]

Got that done. And I'm having the founder register my nameservers like in the tutorial.

I deleted the .org domain in Plesk, created a new .com domain.

Only thing I'm still confused by...
the default DNS entries for the domain I set up has ns.domain.com=main IP. Do I need to manually make a record for each nameserver? ns1=secondIP, ns2=thirdIP.

I don't see that corrolation anywhere. Or maybe that only happens with the registrar and never locally on the box.

[jason]

It doesn't hurt to manually create the nameserver records as A records in your local DNS, although that match actually happens at the central database (your nameservers can't answer for requests that don't know about your nameservers).

As for the question of how the server knows which site to display for traffic coming to the server, that is handled by the the server process for whatever protocol is receiving the request. In the case of HTTP requests, the server looks at the HTTP_HOST header that the browser sends and matches it to a name that it knows about. For Apache these mappings are handled inside your httpd.conf file or one of the other config files that Apache parses, genreally by matching the name to something in a <VirtualHost> block. (These files are usually stored in /etc/httpd/, most commonly /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf and any files inside /etc/httpd/conf.d/ get parsed when Apache starts up). Your control pannel will generally manage these files for you and you should be careful editing them as automatic control panel changes can often overwrite your own.

--Jason