Split DNS? Internal Email, External Website

[westendRIOT]

I'm putting together a Network Edition server at my work. We have a website hosted externally by a third party. Up until now, we were also using that same third party to host our email.

The website and the emails use the same domain name.

How can I set up a custom DNS that will resolve mail queries (IMAP, Outlook Connector, web interface) to the internal IP, but still allow the regular domain name web request to reach the existing external website?

Is it as simple as using mail.domain.com for the Zimbra server, while domain.com will go external? Does anyone have a link to a guide for setting up a DNS server?

I have gone through a crash course in BIND9 while setting up this copy of Network Edition, with Ubuntu 10.04 on VMware ESXi 5.0. Does the DNS server need to run separately in its own VM? I figure it's poor practice to specify the Zimbra server as the DNS server for all of the workstations.

Any help would be appreciated!

[phoenix]

I'm putting together a Network Edition server at my work. We have a website hosted externally by a third party. Up until now, we were also using that same third party to host our email.

The website and the emails use the same domain name.

Why does that matter?

How can I set up a custom DNS that will resolve mail queries (IMAP, Outlook Connector, web interface) to the internal IP, but still allow the regular domain name web request to reach the existing external website?

Look at the Split DNS article, that example for DNS records also applies to your external DNS records for your domain (obviously using the valid public IPs).

Is it as simple as using mail.domain.com for the Zimbra server, while domain.com will go external?

I don't quite understand what you mean by that statement.

Does anyone have a link to a guide for setting up a DNS server?

The details for a Split DNS are all over the forums and in the wiki plus the link above.

Does the DNS server need to run separately in its own VM?

No but you can run the DNS server wherever you like.

I figure it's poor practice to specify the Zimbra server as the DNS server for all of the workstations.

Why, don't you have multiple DNS server on your LAN? Whoever said that's what the DNS server on Zimbra was authoritative for your LAN?

[westendRIOT]

The website and email using the same domain name is giving me problems with DNS. Outlook (or Zimbra Desktop, or whatever) is configured with mydomain.com as the email server. My local DNS points mydomain.com to the local IP for my Zimbra. Then, when one of my workstations tries to go to mydomain.com using their web browser (to reach the externally hosted website), the DNS server catches it and sends them to Zimbra's internal IP.

I tried setting the Zimbra server as mail.mydomain.com, so that Outlook, etc. uses the FQDN as the email server. This would allow web browser requests for mydomain.com hit the forwarders as described in the article you linked to, and use an external DNS entry to reach the externally hosted web server.

But when I set up mail.mydomain.com as the Zimbra server, then the emails appear to come from user@mail.mydomain.com instead of user@mydomain.com.

Is it possible to configure finer granularity with the DNS forwarding? Like to send certain protocol or port requests to one IP vs another?

[axslingr]

What you need to do is configure a local DNS server with your domain name as a master zone, populate it with the proper records(A, MX, NS, etc) using the private ip addresses of your servers, and point all your servers and workstations to it for DNS lookups. You'll also need to point the forwarder to your ISP's DNS server to handle everything else. For your website, just enter an A record that points to the external ip address of your hosting provider. That's all there is to it.

Lance

[dipeshmehta]

Have you gone through SplitDNS article, as phoenix suggested? If you study that one, you would get all answers to your queries

[phoenix]

The website and email using the same domain name is giving me problems with DNS. Outlook (or Zimbra Desktop, or whatever) is configured with mydomain.com as the email server.

It is incorrect to use the domain name for your mail server records. As I've already said - follow the instructions in the Split DNS article.


My local DNS points mydomain.com to the local IP for my Zimbra. Then, when one of my workstations tries to go to mydomain.com using their web browser (to reach the externally hosted website), the DNS server catches it and sends them to Zimbra's internal IP.

I tried setting the Zimbra server as mail.mydomain.com, so that Outlook, etc. uses the FQDN as the email server. This would allow web browser requests for mydomain.com hit the forwarders as described in the article you linked to, and use an external DNS entry to reach the externally hosted web server.

But when I set up mail.mydomain.com as the Zimbra server, then the emails appear to come from user@mail.mydomain.com instead of user@mydomain.com.

That's because you didn't follow the instructions when you initially installed Zimbra, you would have been asked if you wanted to change the domain name and at that point you should have said "yes" and set the correct domain name for the server.

Is it possible to configure finer granularity with the DNS forwarding? Like to send certain protocol or port requests to one IP vs another?

It isn't needed, you just need to configure your DNS & server correctly and according to the wiki article. Your internal records should resolve the FQDN of the server to your LAN IP and your web site records should not resolve via your LAN DNS server and be forwarded to an external DNS resolver (and therefore get to your web server).