Your own nameservers

If you sell hosting under your own name, you do not want your customers to see ns1.corecp.dev in their DNS settings. They should see ns1.yourbrand.com. That is called a vanity nameserver, and this is the page where you make one.

The good news: you do not need a second server for it. The name is yours, the machine stays ours. ns1.yourbrand.com simply points at the addresses our DNS servers already answer on.

Where — Panel → Hosting → Servers → a server with the DNS role → … menu → Manage nameservers. Screenshots are captured with openwolf designqc and land in .wolf/designqc-captures/.

What you need

• A domain that is yours (yourbrand.com). It may be hosted here or somewhere else.
• Access to that domain's registrar — where you bought it. One step can only happen there, and it is described below.

Step 1 — Create the names

Press Add a nameserver and fill in:

• Name — ns1.yourbrand.com. Then do the same for ns2.yourbrand.com; two names is the minimum every registry demands.
• Which reseller — your reseller side. From then on every new zone of your customers carries these names instead of ours.

Under Advanced you can name addresses yourself. Leave it empty: the names then point at this server's addresses, which is exactly the intent.

# corectl dns nameserver create ns1.yourbrand.com --account yourbrand
[corecp] no address given, so ns1.yourbrand.com points at this node's own: 185.117.226.120, 2a10:7180:100::120
[corecp] ns1.yourbrand.com published in yourbrand.com on powerdns
[corecp] account yourbrand now hands out ns1.yourbrand.com
[corecp] existing zones keep their current NS records until: corectl reconcile

If yourbrand.com is not served here we cannot write the records. The screen then shows exactly what to add wherever the zone does live:

Add these records to the zone of yourbrand.com, wherever it is served:

  ns1.yourbrand.com.             IN A     185.117.226.120
  ns1.yourbrand.com.             IN AAAA  2a10:7180:100::120

Step 2 — The glue check

Right after creating the name, CoreCP runs one check nothing else does: it asks the registry's own nameservers whether they know where ns1.yourbrand.com is.

That sounds odd — the name is in the zone you just filled in — but that is precisely the problem. If yourbrand.com is served by ns1.yourbrand.com, a resolver has to look that name up to reach the zone the name lives in. A chicken and egg. The registry breaks the circle with a glue record: the nameserver's address, stored at the registry itself.

We cannot set that glue. Only your registrar can. Which is why this check is always a warning and never a blocker — exactly like the PTR warning on IP addresses.

If there is no glue you get the text to copy across:

At the registrar of the domain, register the nameserver (the screen is called
"register a nameserver", "child host" or "glue record") with:

  host       ns1.yourbrand.com
  addresses  185.117.226.120

Every registrar calls that screen something different. Look for register a nameserver, child host or glue record — one of the three is there.

If everything matches, the check is green and shows which address the registry hands out next to the one we publish. If those point at different machines that is a warning too: a stale glue address sends part of the internet to a server that is no longer there.

Checking again later is always possible:

# corectl dns nameserver glue ns1.yourbrand.com
glue for ns1.yourbrand.com at com: green
  asked      192.5.6.30, 192.33.14.30
  at parent  185.117.226.120
  expected   185.117.226.120

Step 3 — Putting your customers on them

New zones get your names automatically. Existing zones keep their current NS records until the server writes them out again:

# corectl reconcile

Point the customers who keep their domain at another registrar at the new names, and you are done.

Why an end user cannot do this

The page only offers resellers, and the server refuses it over the command line too. That is not a restriction but a definition: a vanity nameserver is a brand that your customers' zones carry. An end user has no customers.

If an end user does want something of their own, that is an IP address of their own. See What you can arrange yourself and the Own IP address section on the account's Plan tab.

Withdrawing a nameserver

You can, but not while a zone still names it. The server refuses that and lists the accounts, because a nameserver name that points nowhere takes every zone that names it off the air.