Chris Salmon Technologies

Continuing down our list outlined in the first article, we have registered Lisa's domain, and pointed the name servers to our own.  Now we will install a "master zone" for her domain, using webmin, a web-based administration tool.  It's important to note that webmin access is blocked from the outside with firewall rules - there is no way for someone outside the network to get access to it.  To work with it, I must first log onto a computer inside the network, which I do through a secure, graphical desktop called NX, which we will cover in another article.  It's best to approach webmin this way, if you are concerned about security. OK so here is what the first step in the configuration looks like in webmin:

 And we then add the new IP number for Lisa, we have a large block of unused addresses above .100 in one of our Class C's and so we will put here as the first one of the block:

OK now we will webmin on over to our secondary server and make sure she has been automatically added over there.  Well her file needed updating, so we forced an update manually in webmin, using the "update from batch file option."  We simply manually enter her domain, the type, the filename, and the master server as a single entry and force the slave (secondary) server to update outside it's normal schedule.

OK, that worked just fine, and we look golden.

And we check things with a simple ping test, first from inside the network (in Houston, TX):

%ping www.lisabyrdsclass.com
PING lisabyrdsclass.com (205.167.0.101): 56 data bytes

YES!  Now how about from another state?  Like, my location in Colorado?

C:\Users\chris>ping www.lisabyrdsclass.com
Pinging lisabyrdsclass.com [205.167.0.101] with 32 bytes of data:

YES!  So this means, that anyone around the internet who looks up her website's name using DNS (which everyone does) will recieve the proper reply, that her website is at 205.167.0.1

Now some sharpies out there might ask, "Why give the site it's own IP address?  Can't you just add it to the sites served by an IP that's already configured, and use Apache's vhost directive to send the traffic to the proper place?"

Well, yes, indeed we could do that, and we are currently hosting many sites in that fashion.  But experience has taught me that Google and the other search engines, tend to group all the websites with the same IP number, blurring the distinctions between those sites.  This means, among other things, that if one site with that IP is about one particular topic, then another site with that IP will also be associated with that topic, in some fuzzy way.  It also means that, if one site with that IP gets penalized by Google for some reason, the other sites with that IP are liable to be similarly penalized or marked as spammy by Google, even though they are totally innocent.  Plus, being an early-internet-days pioneer, I was lucky enough to get plenty of IP space back in 1994-1995 when they gave out Class C blocks for free, and I'm not hurting for IP numbers.

So let's give Lisa's site a completely fresh, new IP, that's never been used for a website, so she can have all the keywords and pagerank and everything associated with that IP all to herself!

OK next step is to give the server her IP as an alias for it, and set up a virtual host in Apache 2 - <continued ...>