Recent appearance of bizarre behavior when adding new domains

[catdude]

We've been running ISPConfig quite smoothly for several months now, but in the last couple weeks I've noted a weird problem. When adding a new domain, the domain doesn't get sompletely added.

Scenario: I want to add a new customer and a domain for that customer. In the admin interface I click "New client" and add the customer info (let's say I specify cloent "TestClient- Dan"). I then click "TestClient-Dan" in the clients list. I see that I've been assigned client number 3117. I click "Site Management", "New", and enter information for domain "varminthunters.us", then save the info.

I then cd into /etc/apache2/vhosts and perform "grep varminthunters.us *" and I find an entry for this domain in Vhosts_ispconfig.conf_02-01-08_08-43-10. It is NOT in Vhosts_ispconfig.conf.

"ls -alt" in /etc/apache2/vhosts produces:
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 360596 2008-01-02 08:43 Vhosts_ispconfig.conf_02-01-08_08-43-10
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 357791 2008-01-02 08:43 Vhosts_ispconfig.conf
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 359336 2007-12-31 15:47 Vhosts_ispconfig.conf_31-12-07_15-47-35
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 359336 2007-12-31 15:45 Vhosts_ispconfig.conf_31-12-07_15-45-50
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 359336 2007-12-31 15:45 Vhosts_ispconfig.conf_31-12-07_15-45-16
etc.

An attempt to visit this web page produces the shared IP notice page.

Shouldn't the domain add process leave me with an entry in Vhosts_ispconfig.conf? What I've been doing for the last couple weeks is manually editing Vhosts_ispconfig.conf to add the missing entries.

The ISPConfig-created directories ARE getting created; that is, /its/isp/hosted/web3387 is there, there is a symlink from that dir to /its/isp/hosted/www.varminthunters.us, and when I create an e-mail account I then find an appropriate directory under /its/isp/hosted/www.varminthunters.us/user.

I first suspected that one of the other engineers here might have changed writeconf.php, but I see that it's still got a timestamp the same as the RCS file (last changed back in August) and an rcsdiff shows no changes.

Could an alteration of a database setting lead to a problem of this sort?

Does anyone have any suggestions as to where I should look to identify why this is happening?

[catdude]

This server was initially set up by someone else. I do recall that he installed suPHP, and I've not worked with that before.

When I run "apache2 -t -f /etc/apache2/vhosts/Vhosts_ispconfig.conf" I get error messages complaining about the SuexecUserGroup lines. I suspect something has changed in my overall settings that is preventing the suexec module from loading, but I'm not sure. Still investigating that.

[falko]

Take a look here: http://www.howtoforge.com/forums/showthread.php?t=7719&highlight=date+appended

[catdude]

Take a look here: http://www.howtoforge.com/forums/showthread.php?t=7719&highlight=date+appended

Thanks. That helped.

Here's another way that can happen: I added some custom Apache directives to one of my domains, and I did so incorrectly. The improper directives caused Apache to error out, so when ISPConfig attempted to restart Apache it detected the error and reverted to a working older config file.

Lesson learned: I need to always verify my custom Apache directives!