Hi all, I have just completed the 'Perfect Server Ferdora' install, which went without a hitch. I am familiar with linux world, but I am new to the web hosting / networking world, so I hoped I could ask a few questions. Firstly - I have completed the install and have a fixed IP address with all of the appropriate ports open on the firewall. How do I actually point domains at the server? Is it as simple as registering them through a domain registrar and pointing them at the IP of the server or is there anything more that I need to do? Does ISPConfig and Apaches virtual hosts handle the redirection of the traffic based on the domain name whan it arrives at the server? Secondly - I wish to run two servers in parallel, incase one fails I would want the backup to keep serving websites. What is the best way to do this? Is there any support in ISPConfig to automatically mirror a webserver or are there any other neat ways to do this? Many thanks, Chris
Firstly - Yes. If all is configured correctly the server sorts out which domain to go to. Secondly - If both your servers are behind the same router and have local IP addresses, you can just switch the port 80 forwarding from one to the other. If they are not behind the same router then I don't know but would like to find out. There is a new mirroring feature in 3.0.2. I'd like to learn more how that works.
The mirror feature does the same configuration steps that were done on the master server on all mirrors. So if a website get created on the master, it get created on the mirror as well. So the mirror system is mirroring the configuration and not the content. For mirroring the content, you can use several solutions like rsync, unison, shared nfs drives or other shared network drives, san storage or cluster filesystems.
I'm not sure the first question was in the terms you were after. I'm fairly new myself and have had a steep 4 month learning curve. You need to tell make sure your router forwards all requests from the outside world that come in on port 80 to the internal ip of your server presuming you are are going to run your own dns records you also need to follow a guide that falko wrote telling you how to set it up and get glue records from the registrar for your main domain. You then need to add dns records to ispconfig. I can't post the link to the guide at the moment but if you search 'ispconfig2 schlundtech name server' you should find it. You need to tell the registrar of the hosted domains what the new name servers are. You then need to create the site in ispconfig. Summary: when someone enters the address of your site the registrar will report it doesn't know the address, but it knows someone who does, it will send them to your name server which it knows is on your ip address (because of glue records) your name server ns.yourdomain.com will report that the site is held on your public ip address of the server. All web traffic to that ip is forwarded by your router back to your server which then serves up the correct site based on the domain asked for. I believe it gets this from the header. This is all done through virtual hosting. I hope that makes sense. I wasn't sure what level the question was aimed at. There's some great help on this site but it does go over my head sometimes and I need to research the answers! Anyone welcome to correct anything I've written.
