DNS Manager can act as a primary DNS server while updating the DNS Zone information from a remote server. In this case, DNS Manager will have to get full DNS Zone information from the remote server, not only the DNS Zone names like in the previous case.

Step-by-step guide

In our example, we will use a Plesk server. In order to generate the full DNS Zones information on a Plesk server, we will use a script from DNS Manager. 

  1. Retrieve the plesk_export.sh scrip from DNSMANAGER_ROOT_D/remote directory. This shell script created by 4PSA for Plesk servers write a file with the names of all the domains on this server and their full DNS Records. The program accepts the name of the final destination file as argument. 

  2. Insert this file in cron and make sure that it will write the list of the domains to a directory that can be accessed over the web.

  3. Configure the script to export master zones and optionally allow_transfer records (edit the script to set the required variables as defined in the script). For example, the command below will dump the list of the domains to a file that can be accessed at http://www.mydomain.com/zone.txt

    sh plesk_export.sh /home/httpd/vhosts/mydomain.com/httpdocs/zone.txt


    Keep in mind that you must add the plesk_export.sh invocation in cron on the Plesk server. This way, the zone.txt file will be updated on regular intervals and DNS Manager will retrieve the latest list of the domains available on the server.


  4. Set up DNS Manager to update the list of the DNS Zones from this location. This will be a remote update location in  DNS Manager. Scripts to perform the same tasks can be written for any control panel. The list of scripts that must be used on remote servers will be updated by 4PSA and the scripts will be placed in DNSMANAGER_ROOT_D/remote directory.

The current version of DNS Manager is shipped with update scripts for Plesk, Ensim, InterWorx Control Panel, Helm, Cobalt and older DNS Manager versions.

For other control panels, which use bind/named (like Cpanel or Direct Admin), you can use the bind_export.sh script. The bind_export.sh script is located in DNSMANAGER_ROOT_D/remote/bind. This script generates a dump file for all the zones defined in the named.conf file by acquiring the data from the zone files.