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I'm having a problem understanding how "white label" nameservers might work, at Amazon Route53. Here is what I have:

Domain destination.com is hosted at hosty.com and registrar has ns1.hosty.com and ns2.hosty.com as nameservers.

Using alias A record at aws route53 to handle mysite.com -> www.mysite.com, www.mysite.com has a CNAME pointer to www.destination.com. Registrar has the normal Amazon ns-xxx-aws-xx.com and ns-xxx-aws-xx.net as nameservers.

At this point, everything works correctly and any requests for www.mysite.com or mysite.com will route to www.destination.com (WordPress mulitsite subdomains). Works great - site comes up as expected.

Now I want to implement white-label nameservers at route53. I followed the directions I found in the documentation, and believe I've set up a set of nameservers using a new domain name I registered. When I ping these, they resolve to the original route53 IP addresses for the Amazon nameservers, so I think they are correct.

ns1.mypath.net
ns2.mypath.net
ns3.mypath.net
ns4.mypath.net

I want to be able to go to the registrar for mysite.com, set the new mypath.net nameservers there -- and have requests to mysite.com route to the hosted zone for www.mysite.com at aws, so it ends up redirecting to www.destination.com (as it was with the normal aws nameservers specified).

I just can't figure out how to wire this.

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  • Why do you want the white label nameservers? Doing so decreases the redundancy and availability of your website's DNS. The default name servers for route 53 are on four different domains under four different top level domains. That makes it much less likely that a single failure in the DNS system will take your site down.
    – Stephen Ostermiller ♦
    Commented Sep 15, 2016 at 11:58
  • aren't they just effectively aliases for aws nameservers? I'm not running my own nameserver system, just "renaming" those I am bound to at aws. The same four original nameservers aws gave me, are linked to my white-label "wrappers"... oh, and the reason why I want these is so I can give my clients a simple, consistent set of nameservers to use at their domain registrar. BTW, the aws documentation lays all this out and never mentions the risk you cited (?)
    – C C
    Commented Sep 15, 2016 at 12:00
  • Yes, they are aliases. Your aliases are less robust than four different AWS domains. If your domain is hijacked it now takes down all your clients.
    – Stephen Ostermiller ♦
    Commented Sep 15, 2016 at 12:12

1 Answer 1

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After some sleep, I got it working.

I was missing one step. I had already established a hosted zone for mysite.com, within route 53. When that was set up it was handed a set of nameservers from aws. I simply edited those and replaced with:

ns1.mypath.net
ns2.mypath.net
ns3.mypath.net
ns4.mypath.net

That was wrong, since the original nameservers are now "disconnected" from the nameservers that mypath.net is wrapping.

So, I deleted the hosted zone for mysite.com and I recreated it from the aws CLI:

aws route53 create-hosted-zone --caller-reference my-nameservers  --name mysite.com --delegation-set-id /delegationset/XXXXXXXXXXXXXX

This assures that the domain mysite.com is tied to that same nameserver delegation set I created for mypath.net

Then, updated the NS records for mysite.com to use the white-label nameservers, re-did my Alias record pointing to the statically mapped s3 bucket (to handle the mapping to www) -- and it seems to work fine now.

Whew.

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