BitFolk customers who would like us to provide secondary DNS service for you should follow the instructions on this page.

Servers

We currently have DNS servers in the following locations:

• London, UK
• San Francisco, CA, US
• Lexington, KY, US
• Quincy, MA, US
• Philadelphia, PA, US

The hosts in London and San Francisco are fully controlled by BitFolk; the others are part of a DNS collective.

Setup

Exactly how your DNS service is configured depends on whether you already have any DNS servers under your control.

You run your own DNS server(s)

If you have your own DNS server(s) and just want BitFolk to provide extra secondaries then please contact support with:

• The IP addresses of your servers
• The names of your domains

Once you have confirmed it is all working, you may add the nameservers mentioned at the end of this document to your zone and DNS registrar.

You are a VPS customer and don't run your own DNS server

For only one or two domains it is often not worth running your own authoritative DNS server especially on a VPS which may be quite RAM-limited. If you operate a VPS with BitFolk then we can take zone files directly from you via rsync.

This method is suitable only for a couple of domains, so it is limited to 2 domains per customer. If you need more then you will need to run your own authoritative DNS server.

To set this up please do the following:

Allow SSH access

Create a user dns-data on your server and allow SSH access from 212.13.194.70 via this SSH key.

Note this is all on one line!

Setting up SSH login via keys is beyond the scope of this document, however some common mistakes are:

• Incorrect permissions on .ssh directory or contents – should not be world read/writable!
• Incorrect ownership on .ssh directory or contents – should all be owned by dns-data!
• Wrapping the public key text or breaking it in some other way

Create zone files

Create a BIND-format zone file for each zone you want secondaried, owned by dns-data and in a place that dns-data can read. Again, doing so is beyond the scope of this document, but here is an example of a minimal zone file which points example.org and www.example.org at a VPS IP:

$TTL 86400
@               SOA     ns0.lon.bitfolk.com. hostmaster.bitfolk.com. (
                        2006101501
                        14400
                        7200
                        1209600
                        43200)

                        NS      ns0.lon.bitfolk.com.
                        NS      ns0.sfo.bitfolk.com.
                        NS      sou.nameserver.net.
                        NS      phl.nameserver.net.
                        NS      sjc.nameserver.net.

			A       212.13.194.x

www                     CNAME   example.org.

Contact support

contact support with the full paths to the zone file(s). They will be rsynced every 15 minutes.

Add DNS servers to your parent domain

Do this step last, after you have confirmed all is working! Note that ns0.sfo.bitfolk.com will not take a zone transfer until it is listed as an NS record in your domain.

You probably should contact your domain registrar to alter the DNS servers in the parent domain. You can add the following:

• ns0.lon.bitfolk.com
• ns0.sfo.bitfolk.com
• sou.nameserver.net
• phl.nameserver.net
• sjc.nameserver.net