Here’s another geeky post, but I am so happy with the results I wanted to document the steps. Okay so in my previous post I set up subdomain wordpress installs, so for example I put my Star Wars collecting site on starwars.kemple.us and what I was doing before was forwarding my domain www.powerofthetoys.com to that address. Well, I found out of a new dynamic dns website that allows the first 5 sites free. I’ve been paying $25 a year for this same service on kemple.us with noip.com. So here are the steps that I used to get starwars.kemple.us to powerofthetoys.com
DNS Setup with Zoneedit
For my dynamic DNS I used Zoneedit Just sign up for a free account to get started.
1. Add a new zone using your previously owned domain name. I used powerofhetoys.com which I bought with godaddy
2. It will automatically add yourdomain and www.yourdomain. You can add whatever extras you want like ftp.yourdomain or mail.yourdomain, but those are the basics.
3. Ignore everything in the “Optional Advanced Bulk Loader” section. Simply type the domain you want to use with zoneedit, and press the “Add Zone” button.
4. You will no be presented with a screen that contains your name servers from Zone edit. Go to your registrars page (godaddy in my case) and add those servers to the dns entries of the domain. In my case it was ns2.zoneedit.com and ns13.zoneedit.com
5. In zoneedit now go and edit the zone for your domain. Click on IP address and add your servers ip address into the field and then click add new ip address.
6. That’s the basic stuff now, but in my case I have a dynamic ip address which means it can change at any time, so I used the ddclient for linux keep in contact with zoneedit and update it automatically.
DDClient setup for Ubuntu
To install the ddclient on Ubuntu simply type
sudo apt-get install ddclient ssh libio-socket-ssl-perl
At the prompts you will be asked to select your Dns provider. You need to select Zoneedit here and input the appropriate values, for example:
Fully qualified domain names: tux.yourdomain.com
Username for dynamic DNS service: your-username
Password: your-password
Enter the interface which is used for using dynamic DNS service: web
After the installation is finished, you need to configure /etc/ddclient.conf. You can edit this file with vim or you favorite text editor. To open the file in Gedit, you can type the following into terminal:
vi gedit /etc/ddclient.conf
ou need to modify the /etc/ddclient.conf and add entries for “daemon”, “ssl” and replace “use=if, if=web” with “use=web, web=’http://www.zoneedit.com/checkip.html/’, web-skip=’IP Address'” to match the following example:
# Configuration file for ddclient generated by debconf
#
# /etc/ddclient.conf
daemon=300
pid=/var/run/ddclient.pid
ssl=yes
protocol=zoneedit1
## use=if, if=web
use=web, web='http://www.zoneedit.com/checkip.html/', web-skip='IP Address'
## server=www.zoneedit.com
server=dynamic.zoneedit.com
login=
password='*******
tux.yourdomain.com
Now open /etc/default/ddclient:
vi gedit /etc/default/ddclient
Check that /etc/default/ddclient contains the following lines:
run_ipup="false"
run_daemon="true"
daemon_interval="300"
You can now restart ddclient with your new configurations.
sudo /etc/init.d/ddclient restart
To check the status of the ddclient daemon:
sudo /etc/init.d/ddclient status
Just because ddclient restarted correctly does NOT mean that it is syncing your IP address correctly with Zoneedit. Since ddclient writes logs to Syslog, you can check to see if the syncing of your Ip is s Success by looking through /var/log/syslog. I use tail to do this in the following way:
tail -f /var/log/syslog
Suggestion: Make note of the single quotes in /etc/ddclient.conf, without them things do not neccessarily work. Also, make sure that you have all the packages installed.
WordPress Setup
1) I have my Wildcard DNS name setup so all domains point to the main sites IP Address… (search google fo info)
2) I setup a subdomain site from within the WordPress Super admin panel like normal…
3) Go into Sites in your Super Admin Panel, click ‘edit’ for that site, the change the ‘Domain’ from ‘mysite.mydomain.com’ to the domain you wish for that site eg powerofthetoys.com…
4) Click ‘Update Options’…
5) At this point your newly mapped domain name should be working…. But the wp-admin login will not work it seems to redirect in a loop….
6)To fix the wp-admin loggin you need to comment out
define( 'DOMAIN_CURRENT_SITE', 'mydomain.com' );in the wp-config and replace it withdefine( 'DOMAIN_CURRENT_SITE', ''. $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'].'' );…..
7) Thats it… it should all be working… (depending on your server setup)
Now you should be all good to go. I used info from a couple of places to figure this out. Here are those links, so they get proper credit.
Zoneedit Tutorial
DDClient Tutorial
Domain Mapping Without Plugins WordPress