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Augustine C. Anyasodor
Augustine C. Anyasodor

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Assigning a Namecheap Domain name to a Linode VM

A few days back I tried to map my VM's IP address to a domain name. Unfortunately my VM provider did not have a document that outlines the steps to do that (or in the spirit of sportsmanship, let's say it was difficult to find) . Their community had a few answers to the question but as with question-comment styled documents, there was no standard and in most comments, the detailing was not to the teeth. Luckily I found a slightly comprehensive post but I had to figure out a lot of things, so I decided the next Infrastructure Engineer shouldn't have to go through these.

Here's a straightforward guide to assigning a namecheap domain to a linode VM

You'll have to do some setting on both sides so lezz go

Linode Settings

  • On the your dashboard, click Domains
  • Create a domain
    • Enter the domain name and an email address
    • For insert default records select ... from one of my linodes and select a linode
    • click Create Domain

Now a domain name has been added, next connect to a Linode

  • Go to your target linode and open Network tab
  • copy the IPv4 and IPv6 addresses
  • Go back to Domains and select the target domain name.
  • Scroll down to find A/AAAA Record and add an A/AAAA Record
  • For each record, add the IPv4 and IPv6 address as the IP address, leave Hostname empty and leave TTL as default; save

Namecheap/Domain Settings

  • Open the domain dashboard
  • Set Nameservers to Custom DNS
  • Add ns1.linode.com till ns5.linode.com to Nameservers
  • Save

You'll have to wait a while for the changes to take effect. According to articles I read during my research, it should take a maximum of 24 hours. It is usually faster in some cases.

This guide is also open source. Its available on Github. I'm expecting feedback to make this guide more helpful. I also intend to widen the scope of the project, so i'm accepting contributions with regards to other Domain name services and other VM providers.

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