A Day in Paradise

We are in the development stage of a site at domain.com. To host this site we created an account in Cpanel for domain.com and started our testing. After a couple of days we get a report that email that is being sent from domain1.com is not reaching the recipients at domain.com.

After poking around for a couple minutes, it’s obvious that since both domain1.com and the (non-active) domain.com are on the same box the mail is being delivered locally.

After a quick chat with the nice people at #cpanel, I got the following solution.

1. create a A record for external.domain.com and point that to the IP address of the live MX server for domain.com
2. create an MX record on the local domain.com Zone and point that to external.domain.com

And people say I waste time when I’m on IRC.

The other option I had was to add the domain to /etc/remotedomains and remove it from /etc/localdomains but since this is a managed server I’m working on, I don’t have that option.

The last couple weeks I’ve had to work on a managed server which only has Cpanel access and the associated WebHost Manager. The people in #cpanel on efnet have been VERY helpful in getting me around some sticky configuration issues.

Putting 2 sites on one control panel

A client had a domain name which was registered and hosted using Yahoo! Small Business Services. Due to the fact that he was using all the YSB services, he could not transfer the domain to our servers, best thing we could do is point www.domain.com to our server and let YSB take care of all the services which were attached to *.domain.com.

This client already had a Cpanel account on this server (we’ll call it domain1.com), so I figured we could just create an addon “parked” domain which would catch that domain. For some reason (which I can’t remember now) that didn’t work.

What finally worked was to create a subdomain of domain1.com, and then create an CNAME record from www.domain.com which pointed at domain.domain1.com.

Obviously this is a bit screwy, but it works.