Questions in regards to ISP-Server Setup - Ubuntu 5.10 "Breezy Badger"
 

I am relatively new to linux in itself, although I have played around with RH, SuSE, and Mandrake in the distant past. I want to be able to run my own web server using the ISPConfig HowTo. I followed the instruction and it seems to be working grat. Much kudos to tado for writing this easy to follow setup. However I'm having some problems understanding a few issues. Here is some basic information on what I've already done or have in place:

• Registered thermalhost.com
• Also currently have cipherghost.com and 454corp.com which I have owned for several years hosted elsewhere. (Ideally I'd like to move these domains onto this box as well)

1) On page 3, under the section Setting the Hostname it gives an exmple as follows:

Regardless of what I change this to(i.e. server.thermalhost.com) certain parts of Ubuntu stop working, if I reboot I get a message stating that it the hostname has an error and gives me a warning that certain parts of the OS may not operate correctly. It then gives me the option to try again or login anyway. Once I choose login anyway, I can't do basic things such as open File Browser, gEdit, Synaptic Package Manager, etc...It seems like the change prevents these from working in its entirety. Not knowing what to do the first time I simply reformatted and skipped the Setting the Hostname section and went through the entire installation, which is working fine it seems. I tried to set the hostname again last night with the same results as before, I ound that after logging back in it acted the very same way and I tried, using terminal, to change it back to localhost. It started working again but I'm unsure of how to go about this.

2) Also another issue I'm having trouble understanding is with BIND. I have my registrar setup to look at my server for DNS resolution. I also was thinking of using everydns.net as a secondary DNS if possible. However when I check DNS report I receive several fatals. I am unsure exactly how to treat each of these, some of them(i.e. ns0.thermalhost.com; mail.thermalhost.com) need a DNS entry but I am thinking that these would need to be edited in the named.conf directly instead of using ISPConfig. Please check out my DNSReport here .

If I need to submit more information please let me know. Thanks in advance for any advice offered.

You must make sure that the hostname you use exists in DNS. If it doesn't, then you should at least add it to /etc/hosts.

thermalhost.com points to a private IP address:

You must use public IP addresses because otherwise nobody from outside your network can see your site.

Have a look here: http://www.howtoforge.com/forums/sho...92&postcount=4
and here: http://www.howtoforge.com/traditional_dns_howto
and here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_name_system to learn more about DNS.

Thanks for the reply Falko, I will read over these articles you suggested and give them a go this evening. If I have any more question I will post them back in this thread. Thanks again!

I believe I have these options configured correctly now. Additionally I would appreciate someone to look over these screenshots I've taken of the various config screens. I seem to be having trouble understanding the documentation fully, so please excuse my ignorance. Here is a pdf with all of the screenshots I thought might pertain to some of my misconfiguration. To clarify let me first say that this server is behind an IPCop box. I have all necessary ports forwarded to my server which resides on orange(192.168.2.2)

1) Regarding postfix I cannot seem to get past my ISP when it comes to sending mail to my domain, mail.thermalhost.com(68.15.249.219) I have to use smarthost.coxmail.com as a relayhost and I have set it as such in /postfix/main.cf. After setting it and restarting postfix I tested it by sending a mail from my gmail account to admin@thermalhost.com and got the following result:
How would I go about correcting this or is it possible?

2) Secondly I tried to test one of my website before migrating the domain name from my current host to myself. I FTP'ed my index.php page off of my host and onto www.thermalhost.com/www.cipherghost.com. When I browse to it I just get the code for the index.php (This can be seen in my PDF file that I linked, the picture is at the very bottom.

Basically all-in-all I want www.thermalhost.com to be my webpage for my lil "ISP" where I can post what I do and why with it. I also want mail.thermalhost.com will klink to postifx for all domains regardless of name, ns0.thermalhost.com/ns1.thermalhost com are pointed from my registrar to my box which IPCop port forwards over to my ISPConfig box. I want to use these as the baseline for all domains. The additionally I want to host cipherghost.com and nocturnalrage.net but somehow I'd like to test them before I point the domain names at my server as they are up and running on my host currently and are functional. I know this may seem like a lot and maybe I'm making it a heck of a lot harder than it is, but again please bear with my ignorance and confusion. I appreciate any and all help. Thanks again :)

RBrantley

You might also have to provide a username and a password for smarthost.coxmail.com: http://www.howtoforge.com/forums/sho...4&postcount=18

This happens because you're using www.thermalhost.com instead of www.cipherghost.com which is a completely different vhost.

And you cannot use www.cipherghost.com right now because it is pointing to the wrong IP address: 216.35.197.40 instead of 68.15.249.219.
This happens although you have configured everything correctly in ISPConfig. But the problem is: the ISPConfig server is not the authoritative name server for cipherghost.com. The authoritative name servers are:

If you want your ISPConfig server to be authoritative for cipherghost.com, you must tell the registrar about it so that he can make the necessary changes.

Thanks for you time and your answer Falko, I will check on the smarthost relay later today. Also am I understanding correctly that I cannot truey test the functionality of cipherghost.com before transfering the domain, I basically just want to see once I transfer the domain it will work correctly. Other than what I mentioned above is there anything else that looks awry in my setup in your opinion?

You must point cipherghost.com to your ISPConfig server's IP address. If you do this on the current name servers or tell your registrar that you want to use your own name servers doesn't matter.
If you just want to test, you can also modify your client PC's hosts file: http://www.howtoforge.com/forums/sho...s+file+windows


What I've seen so far looks ok. :)

Ok here's yet another one :P

I setup one that I can afford to mess with, my blog :) I've got for nocturnalrage.net forwarded to my box. I have the data in place and the sql tables in place for my blog, yet all I ever get is untiltled document and a blank page, I uploaded it into the /web/ directory under the login I set for nocturnalrage.net...What am I doing wrong?

Anything in your Apache error log?

It seems that any site I have setup is redirecting to /var/www/ instead of var/www/(web1/web2/web3) etc... This possibly is a problem in my initial setup through the ISPConfig web GUI, but I'm not sure what it could be. Here is a piece of my apache2 errog log from yesterday and today:


Basically I am having several different issues I believe, this one, mail, and a couple of others. The mail and others I can work on later, mainly I'm interested in getting my sites working, ftp works fine so I have uploaded 3 sites so far and imported 3 SQL backups flawlessly, I'm just confused on why all the websites would point to the root directory of var/www/. It almost seems like the vHosts aren't being created correctly or I'm missing a step somewhere. Please refer to nocturnalrage.net, thermalhost.com for reference.

Thanks again Falko for all you help and understanding, if you need more info just let me know and I can post whatever you might need to look at.