Help making sense of IPs and A records

Submitted ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨Maroon@lemmy.world⁩ to ⁨selfhosted@lemmy.world⁩

I am trying to host my first website + service.

#My server setup

I have a static webpage in server 1. A gotosocial installation in server 2. They are connected to a reverse proxy (server 3). This has a public IP of (not exact) 204.230.30.104.

#My router setup

I can open ports 80 and 443. I just don’t know to which IP (I’ll explain why down).

#My registrar

In have a domain, say ‘newexample.com’. The @ has an A record for the IP (not exact) 208.145.80.33

#My confusion

If I want to make a subdomin for GoToSocial like ‘gts.social.new example.com’, do I use CNAME or A record?
If I want to serve the static website to be served at ‘www.newexample.com’ , do I remake an A record for www.newexample.com ?
There appears to be a CNAME in my DNS record already by the registrar for www that goes to some “redirect” link.
How do I make the domain connect to my server and how to make the server connect to my domain properly?

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Rivalarrival@lemmy.today ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
An A record maps to an IP address. A CNAME record maps to another URL. Since you are trying to map to an IP address rather than a URL, you will want an A record.

If all of your sites will be served from the same proxy server at 204.230.30.104, you can create a single, wildcard A record for *.newexample.com. This will point every subdomain to your proxy’s IP address. You don’t need to create an A record for each subdomain.

If you are planning on serving some subdomains from 204.230.30.104 and other subdomains from another proxy at 69.4.20.187, you would need A records for pointing the subdomains toward their respective proxies.

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- Maroon@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  Thanks for the reply. That makes sense. I now understand how to point the domains / subdomains using “A” record.
  
  Could you please also clarify which IP I need to open ports 80 and 443 to, in the router? Or does the IP in the router actually refer to the internal IP device addresses? (Like 142.168.0.6, etc)?
  
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  - Rivalarrival@lemmy.today ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
    It depends on how you want to do it; how your reverse proxy server is setup. I use Pangolin running on a VPS as my proxy server. It uses a tunnel (“Newt”) between web servers running on my home network and the VPS, so I don’t need any open/forwarded ports on my home router.
    
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Darkassassin07@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
If you have a static IP address, you can just use A records for each subdomain you want to use amd not really worry about it.

If you do not have a static IP address, you may want to use one single A record, usually your base domain (example.com), then CNAME records for each of your subdomains.

A CNAME record is used to point one name at another name, in this case your base domain. This way, when your IP address changes, you only have to change the one A record and all the CNAME records will point at that new IP as well.

Example:

A example.com 1.2.3.4

CNAME sub1.example.com example.com

CNAME sub2.example.com example.com

You’d then use a tool like ACME.sh to automatically update that single A record when your IP changes.

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Decronym@lemmy.decronym.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:

Fewer Letters	More Letters
HTTP	Hypertext Transfer Protocol, the Web
IP	Internet Protocol
LXC	Linux Containers
NAS	Network-Attached Storage
VPS	Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting)
nginx	Popular HTTP server

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