When we set up our server (IP address 66.139.75.198) for the first time, we used "b-talk.com" as the domain.
Later, we changed it to "seeksift.com".
To make the change to "seeksift.com", we updated all our DNS records, we changed /etc/hosts to read "server1.seeksift.com" instead of "server1.b-talk.com", and we edited /etc/sysconfig/network to replace all traces of "b-talk.com" with "seeksift.com".
And it worked as we expected -- people can access the web site at
www.seeksift.com, other services such ssh, ftp, and email (POP) access all work as expected using "seeksift.com" as the domain.
The only strange thing is if we ping the server, this is the output we get:
$ ping seeksift.com
PING seeksift.com (66.139.75.198) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from server1.b-talk.com (66.139.75.198): icmp_seq=1 ttl=48 time=82.4 ms
64 bytes from server1.b-talk.com (66.139.75.198): icmp_seq=2 ttl=48 time=82.0 ms
64 bytes from server1.b-talk.com (66.139.75.198): icmp_seq=3 ttl=48 time=83.4 ms
So we're seeing "server1.b-talk.com" where we expected "server1.seeksift.com".
When we changed the DNS records, we did request that our name registrar (GoDaddy) include a redirect, so that anyone looking for b-talk.com would be redirected to seeksift.com, but from what we understand, that redirect sits on a server in GoDaddy's domain, and should not have anything to do with the result of pinging seeksift.com.
Other than being a minor annoyance (everything else *does* work as expected), we want to know:
(a) How to correct this on the ping result?
and
(b) Whether or not it's ok to allow the b-talk.com domain registration to expire?
We don't want to pay to renew it; we know that would mean losing the redirect at GoDaddy (not a big deal, since everyone knows the new address now), but we don't want to change it without making sure it would not create any problems for access to seeksift.com.