Domain Names

From StudentDevWiki

Hosting your own domain off the myRPI-space is a little bit more complicated than we'd like it to be. Unfortunately RPI's firewall prohibits us from running our own nameservers, and as such you need to rely on another service to take care of this.

Setting up a New Domain Name

For the sake of this tutorial, I will assume you have already purchased a domain name and know how to edit the DNS servers with your registrar.

1. Find a company that will give you DNS control over your domain. If this is your registrar then you're all set; if not check out a free service like zoneedit. If you choose the zoneedit route, follow their "getting started" guide available here: http://zoneedit.com/doc/faq.html#faq2

2. Create an "A" (ip) record for both yourdomain.com and www.yourdomain.com and point them to the IP address for the studentdev server, which is 128.113.91.227. This static IP is assigned to us by the institute, as such it shouldn't change very frequently (if ever).

3. Login to cPanel.

4. Visit the Addon Domains page.

5. In the New Domain Name box enter: yourdomain.com. Do not include the www, this will be added automatically! The defaults should work fine for subdomain/ftp username and document root. If you do change the document root, make sure it is inside the public_html folder. Enter a password for FTP access to this domain and click "Add Domain!"

6. Test your domain to see if it works. Remember that DNS servers can take some time to update to the entire internet, so your domain may not resolve right away. To upload files, you can login to FTP using your regular system account, and navigate to the document root you setup in step 5. This will typically be something like public_html/domainname.

More Details on FTP

When you setup a domain and specify an FTP username and password, you're creating an account that only has access to that specific domain name. To login to only that domain, append @yoursite.myrpi.org to the FTP username you created in step 5. For example, if my primary account was test.myrpi.org, and I created a domain with an FTP username of foo, I would set my FTP client to login using the account foo@test.myrpi.org and the host ftp.test.myrpi.org