[Case 52354]Make cPanel friendly to accounts with website hosted elsewhere.

[beddo]

Consider the following scenario:

A customer has a domain.
The WHM/cPanel provider is to host the DNS and provide mail services.
The customer has a third party web developer and hosts the website.
The customer wants the website to be visible under www.domain.tld and domain.tld

Currently the only way to do this is to edit the zone file and change around some records. The @ IN A record must be changed to point to the web developers IP along with the www. Other CNAME records that rely on the @ pointing to the WHM server must be changed to A or to an alternate CNAME.

This I am fine with.

What I am not fine with is the way some key scripts react to these changes. The scripts that I have identified so far (there may be others) are as follows:

Change Site's IP Address
The various copy accounts from another server scripts
The various restore backup scripts

If you use any of these scripts and they come across a DNS set up as described above they obliterate it with no undo option.

These scripts should be amended to do the following:

Detect the setup which is believes is incorrect - this it already does
Hold the process before making any changes and bring up a prompt. The options should be 1) Abort the process and make no changes. 2) Proceed with the changes but do not make any alterations to custom settings. 3) Proceed with the changes and revert settings to the default, logging the exact changes made rather in case someone clicks the wrong button and needs to undo it manually.

Option 3 is effectively what the scripts currently do, with the addition of proper logging. Currently only the change IP script tells you that it has "corrected" some errors in the config, but doesn't tell you exactly what it has changed.

In the case of restore scripts that involve multiple accounts the checks and prompts could all be rolled into one at the beginning of the process so that the restoration is not continually suspended at points throughout the process.

At the moment I have nearly 100 accounts to change the IP address on. Before doing each one I have to open up the zone file, document any custom settings, make the change and then re-import the custom settings. It also means that I cannot use the change multiple site sites ip accounts page because all the websites will go down until I can put in the correct settings.

[cPanelDavidG]

This sounds more like a product deficiency than a feature request? Have you submitted a bug report or support ticket about this yet? If not, I recommend doing so as that may result in a faster resolution to this issue.

[beddo]

I submitted a ticket first and was told to submit it as a feature request. I haven't submitted a bug report though, I don't want to be hassling too many different chains of command!

[cPanelTristan]

The restore backup script does not honor the existing DNS zone file records to restore the /var/named/domain.tld.db entries? I do understand the purpose of Change Site's IP Address changing the A record IP for the site and all other portions of the zone, since it would normally be expected that when changing a site's IP that you are changing it for the website as well. I also understand the domain transfer script changing the zone, since it imports the zone to the new server with the new server's IP address.

I do not understand the restore backup script restoring a different zone than the original one, which would be a case for a bug if that is what you are experiencing.

[beddo]

The restore backup script is not really much of a concern to me at the moment, I mentioned it more of a by the way. When I built this server I copied all the backups from my old server and restored the backups. It detected all the IPs as invalid and zapped them. I cannot recall exactly what method I used to restore them but it took some time to correct it.

I would have thought that any destructive loss of custom settings without a warning or option to back out of the changes would be considered a bug though.

All I want to do is be able to change a site's IP address and have it change only the IP addresses that point to the current IP of the server.

[cPanelTristan]

If you select to change a site's IP address, it would be expected you want to change that site's IP address. This would not be a bug to change the IP address to me personally.

For the transfer, it updates the zone files as well to reflect the new machine. The old zone should still exist on the old server to review if you want to revise it for changes. Again, this is expected behavior.

It would not be expected behavior for a restored account on the same machine to not use the already existing DNS zone. It really shouldn't be expected behavior when restoring an account to a new machine for that to not use the custom zone. Those instances would be bugs.

[beddo]

If you select to change a site's IP address, it would be expected you want to change that site's IP address. This would not be a bug to change the IP address to me personally.

I see this slightly differently. If you are changing a site's IP address from 1.1.1.1 to 2.2.2.2 whilst keeping the account on the same server I would expect all instances that refer to 1.1.1.1 to be changed to 2.2.2.2. I would not expect any instances that do not currently refer to 1.1.1.1 to be changed, or at least have the ability to prevent this from happening.

I would go into the code and temporarily comment out the bit that looks for IP addresses other than those bound to the server to change except the replies on the ticket seem reluctant to tell me where that bit of code is.

[Tech]

I'm adding to this case / feature request following a discussion in ticket Id 2109362 on account transfers where Paul was kind enough to provide the link.

The current situation is sub optimal when performing as near as possible transparent account / server migrations in certain situations. From our experience ideally:

1. The transferred account on source server is locked as soon as transfer is complete to prevent new content being written to this. The DNS zone on the source system is updated so that any requests that reach it are provided with the new server IP (the transfer scripts allow this).

2. The above said, any client modifications to the zone that direct to third party systems must be retained (or at least the option to do so provided). To not have this means that either the zones must be copied manually, or each must be manually checked against a backup and corrected - which makes the transfer scripts, which are otherwise excellent, much less useful.

[monarobase]

+1 for only changing the IP's that correspond to the account's IP and not all of them… any IP's that point to an external server should not be changed.

If they do need to be changed it's not difficult to do so manually, however I'm all for having this as an option so no manual change is necessary.

[cPanelDavidG]

This is now being treated as a deficiency rather than a feature request. I see many of you have already contacted us treating this as a bug. If you haven't already done so and you would like to be notified when this is resolved - please visit http://go.cPanel.net/bugs and submit a report so we can contact you when this is resolved.

Since this is no longer being treated as a feature request, I am closing this thread. Anyone experiencing this issue should file a report so we can let you know when this is resolved.