So I've been working with the DNS tables on my server, and I was curious about what entries absolutely have to been in there for a domain to work?

I've got the following that I figure are probably neccesary.

NS (ns1.nameserver.com)
NS (ns2.nameserver.com)
A
ns.domain A

Any others? Are any of those uneccesary? I'm trying to understand this whole DNS thing better....

A properly formed DNS entry for a domain name should be something like the following... assuming www.domain.com, email at mail.domain.com, contact email at me@me.com and primary name server at ns1.domain.com



There are a number of extras you can see by doing a dig with verbose mode turned on (try for yourself at http://www.demon.net/external/)

Note: Yes it is meant to be a dot not an @ in the Start of Authority records in me.me.com

Actually,

Your really only need 5 entries:

domain.com. IN NS ns.nameserver1.com.
domain.com. IN NS ns.nameserver2.com.
domain.com. IN A
domain.com. IN MX 10 domain.com.
*.domain.com. IN CNAME domain.com.


Typically, I set mine up as follows, which includes a few extra lines, just to make things easier to follow:


domain.com. IN NS ns.nameserver1.com.
domain.com. IN NS ns.nameserver2.com.
domain.com. IN A
mail.domain.com. IN CNAME domain.com.
www.domain.com. IN CNAME domain.com.
ftp.domain.com. IN CNAME domain.com.
*.domain.com. IN CNAME domain.com.
domain.com. IN MX 10 mail.domain.com.


NOTE #1: if you build these by hand, be sure to include the "." at the end of each full domain and all the rest of the stuff for a properly formatted DNS entry. If you just use Plesk's PSA (which I'm assuming you are), then just create these records there (it'll add the "." at the end)

NOTE #2: You notice I took out the PTR record. They aren't needed for Virtual Hosted domains (more than one domain on a single IP). PTR records map IPs to Names, so a PTR here wouldn't make sense (Plesk puts one by default, but I changed that).

NOTE #3: If you are using your own nameservers, you do not need to create separate plesk accounts for each nameserver, contrary to other threads here. If your nameservers are ns1.nameserver.net and ns2.nameserver.net, then create an account for nameserver.net but add the following 4 lines:

ns1.nameserver.net A
ns2.nameserver.net A
PTR ns1.nameserver.net.
PTR ns2.nameserver.net.


I also add an A and PTR records for simply nameserver.net, since it is a 3rd IP (the main IP of my box).

HTH!

-Danimal

Yes but a domain name is considered badly administered if it doesn't have a start of authority record.

Quick question about the serial number.
Does it have to be any particular combination, or can we make it whatever we like based on our own twisted logic?

I guess I'm a bad administrator... how do I add an SOA record?

Plesk does it for you... it's only if you end up DNS administrating yourself that you need to bother about it.

(And thus the serial is added for you by plesk)

if your doing it manually use "2002100501" as the serial as in 2002 the year 10 the month 05 the day and 01. if you make any changes to the DNS records you'll have to change the last 01 to 02 and so forth. At least this is how I learned it on my SuSE box before ever going tp plesk.