Changing Account IP

Hey All,
First off to the Interworx Team: Awesome panel! It really is the best thing ever, and you guys have certainly filled a niche market as the only decent looking CP that uses DJBDNS software. Nice work.

We are loading up a test server right now with some accounts and encountered a couple of problems/howto questions for everyone:

  1) It doesn't look like it is possible to change a shared IP account over to a dedicated IP address after it has been created from the control panel.  Is there a shell script we can use, or is this still in the works?

  2) When a new [b]shared[/b] account is created is there anyway for the user to view their site while DNS is updating?  This is a common request, and we could easily hack the Apache default virtual host to include this, but we wanted to check first.  Doing: http://serverip/~username does not seem to work.

Thanks again!

Peter

1.) You should be able to click on the IP Management button in the menu and see a list of all IPs for that server with two radio buttons for each IP to switch between shared and dedicated.

2.) What we do is create a temp domain, i.e. domaincom.nexcess.net, and point it to the IP their account is on and then place a ServerAlias in their domaincom.conf file with the temp domain name so they can use the temp domain to access their account while DNS is updating.

The more I think about it, #1 would only work if it was the only account on that shared IP address.

I think how we’ve handled it otherwise is just to update their VirtualHost line in the conf file with the new IP address and then update it in the DNS system.

Greg,
Thanks for the super fast reply.

I think I wasn’t too clear on #1. I need to convert a shared IP account over to a dedicated IP account. This is mainly because of question #2, and not being able to view the acocunt from a sub-domain/IP.

Ok, I will hack up the skeleton default v-host file to support #2.

Thanks,

Peter

You can manually edit the config file for that particular account. Not sure if you are comfortable with doing that, but that is the only way I know how to now besides deleting and recreating the account.

x= shared IP
y= dedicated IP

<VirtualHost xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx:80>
Stuff here
</VirutalHost>

would become:

<VirtualHost yyy.yyy.yyy.yyy:80>
Stuff here
</VirutalHost>

EDIT:
You would find the files in the /etc/httpd/conf.d/accountname.com.conf

Justin,
No, thats not a problem for us at all. I guess I wanted to make sure that changing the config file manually would also update Nodeworx and Siteworx. I was under the impression that it created those Apache files from data in a MySQL db, which we could change as well.

Thanks for the help,
Peter

Actually, I’m not sure about that because Iworx does store a lot of info in a database, but I do know that Iworx doesn’t overwrite those config files, so you can edit those without causing harm.

I will try out editing those files on my server to refresh my memory on how it updates in NodeWorx.

Ok, just did a quick test and it seems the answer is… it kind of works :rolleyes:

The IP managment does refelect the change, but the DNS and actual SiteWorx detail in NodeWorx (when you click “edit” on the NodeWorx page where it list all the SiteWorx accounts) does not.

You could go in and edit the DNS manually to match the new settings, but the IP address in the SiteWorx account info is locked in. Although I don’t think that would actually affect anything.

Some more questions…
Also, I’m not sure what happens if you selected dedicated on a current shared IP… Maybe that would convert it? Would it work if you had more than one site already on the shared IP?

Justin,
I tried converting a shared IP into a dedicated IP, however it returned an error stating that you can’t change an IP’s status with sites currently assigned to it.

I will do some testing here to see if I can find a way for this to work.

Peter

The IP managment does refelect the change, but the DNS and actual SiteWorx detail in NodeWorx (when you click “edit” on the NodeWorx page where it list all the SiteWorx accounts) does not.

You have to manually edit the /etc/httpd/conf.d/<domain>.conf and change the IP like you described, and then you must edit the DNS records for the domain the DNS management as well. Once you change the IP in DNS management, the IP will also be updated when you click “Edit” on the NodeWorx page where it lists all the SiteWorx accounts.

It will only let you convert a shared IP to a dedicated IP if there is 1 or 0 domains currently on that IP. There is no problem converting an dedicated IP to a shared IP if there are 0 or 1 domains (the only options) on that IP.

Hope that helps. The next release will make IP changing as easy as changing the other SiteWorx account features - for now you have to do the few steps mentioned above.

Paul