domain not working without www

[merida]

i have an strange problem, with a domain of mine, which i call mydomain.com

- in my browser, i can acess my domain if I use the prefix www.
thus : http://www.mydomain.com works fine

- in my browser, i can NOT access the domain without the www.
thus : http://domain.com does not work

same happens with nslookup: nslookup finds the correct IP for the www.mydomain.com but fails to find something for mydomain.com

any ideas what might cause this problem ???

[Mark_NL]

Not sure about ISPConfig 3 .. but when you add a site, i'll only create a co-domain for domain.com, you've to add one called *.domain.com yourself after adding the site ..

also your dns record should have domain.com and www.domain.com (or maybe a *.domain.com) pointing to your ip.

[merida]

in ispconfig3, I have setup the zone (SOA) as mydomain.com
so I am rather convinced that things are fine on DNS level

any more ideas to help me out. i am pulling my hair out !

[merida]

I am having the same thing with nslookup


nslookup www.mydomain.com --> no problem
nslookup domain.com --> nslookup does not give back any result

[Mark_NL]

setting domain.com as SOA doesn't mean that it's already bound to your IP.

so create an A record:

mydomain.com A 1.2.3.4

save, enjoy

[merida]

Dear Marc, thanks for helping me. however, i already had the following dns records:

A xxx.163.67.237 0
A mydomain.com xxx.163.67.237 0
A mail xxx.163.67.237 0
A ns1 xxx.163.67.237 0
A www xxx.163.67.237 0
MX mail.mydomain.com 10
MX mydomain.com mail.mydomain.com 10
NS mydomain.com ns1.mydomain.com 0


you remark that this list has two "empty host" dns records:


A xxx.163.67.237 0
MX mail.mydomain.com 10


This did not make any difference to the final result. I removed and added these two records, but nothing changed.

so the problem is still here.

on top of that, i also have another problem, which is probably related to my first one:

my mailserver works: i can send/receive emails from my mailserver
which is called mail.mydomain.com. thus emails for <name>@mail.mydomain.com arrive without any problem.

however, with the MX records mentioned above, I can not recieve any email at <name>@mydomain.com


To summarize:

- no emails can be recieved at mydomain.com
- nslookup fails at mydomain.com
- website is not reachable at mydomain.com

but:

- website is reachable at www.domain.com
- emails can be recieved at mail.mydomain.com

[Mark_NL]

as long as "mydomain.com" resolves to nothing, all your problems will keep existing.

i do not see the point in these records:
A xxx.163.67.237 0
MX mail.mydomain.com 10



if you want to, you can PM me your real domain, so i can have a look at it.

If you run your own dns server you probably also need a glue record ( http://faq.domainmonster.com/dns/glue_record/ )

[merida]

Dear Marc,

please correct me if i am wrong, but i have this record:

A mydomain.com xxx. 163.67.237 0

which means that mydomain is resolved.

-------------

Anyway, i made some progress: In my dns records, i added a dot (.) after mydomain.com. Now nslookup seems to work

------------------

However, the email problem persist. I can receive email from gmail, but not from hotmail. however, i have only one working nameserver. could this be a problem?

------------------------

[Mark_NL]

ah you've missed the "." in the end :P

well, the changes could take a while for all the caches are rerfeshed

host -t mx mydomain.com

should return your mail server's address now .. if you have problems receiving mail there, look at the error logs /var/log/mail.*

[merida]

yes, i missed the dot (.) at the end.
Why is it imporant?

i would suppose that

mydomain.com

means the same thing as

mydomain.com.

Why do i need the dot at the end ??