Grey Light in websites

Question

Grey Light in websites

Hi everybody

I run the lates Mountain Lion server and use it to have my companies and two ohter websites running.

I cannot get the green light in the websites tab, neighter in the VPN taps to work.

I set up DNS, if I check sudo changeip -checkhostname it reads " success" has a ip for nameserver and dns server.

access.mydomain.com has a nameserver record and machine record and a zone record, pointing to the local IP address. It performs lookup only for the server, forwarding server I setup with the IP address of the AE basestation.

I am behind a AE basestation which is controlled by the server.app.

In the network pane of the server machine I put in 127.0.0.1 as DNS server

VPN is working

All the sites are working

...but the light is grey...not green. A bug?

Yours

Pierre

MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.7)

Posted on Nov 21, 2012 12:59 PM

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Answer 1

Jan 22, 2017 11:22 AM in response to Pierre Froelicher1

This solved the issue for me.

My server is behind my cable modem and Cisco Router. After I tried all the other suggestions from a variety of sources, I made sure the correct ports were open to my server in the router then turned off the router and cable modem for about one minute. I rebooted the cable modem... waited about a minute for it to sync back up to the network... then powered up my router. After the router completely booted up and settled down. All the connectivity indicators in the Websites section glowed green.

Also, don't forget to disable "Filter Internet NAT Redirection" in your modem if you want to be able to get to your in-house hosted website using the domain name URL, not just the local server IP address.

Hope this helps someone.

Dana Haynes - Accularian

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Answer 2

Nov 21, 2012 4:20 PM in response to Pierre Froelicher1

Hi Pierre,

1. You need to add a dns alias record for each website within the zone in DNS Tab for the green light to show.

2. After you set up the alias records, you then may still need to click on the hostname field in Web Sites and VPN, and re-enter the name before the Green Light will show.

Example. Say you are hosting 4 websites - for www.domain1.net, crm.domain1.net, www.mydomain.com and you want OS X Server wiki access via access.mydomain.com

You need 2 DNS Primary Zones - mydomain.com and domain1.com

You need a Nameserver and MX ( if you are hosting mail as well) record for each Zone pointing to the server ip address.

You need a machine record for at least the server within the mydomain.com zone.

Then you need alias records in each Zone as follows for any websites other than the default sites which would be http:// or https://access.mydomain.com. This is where the wiki shows up if you turn it on.

Alias Records in DNS

Zone - mydomain.com

Host Name - www

Destination - access.mydomain.com

Zone - domain1.net

Host Name - www

Destination - access.mydomain.com

Zone - domain1.net

Host Name - crm

Destination - access.mydomain.com

(No alias needed for access.mydomain.com in case that wasn't clear!)

Re VPN - if you have set up a machine record of access.mydomain.com and you type that address as the host into the vpn host box, the green light should show. This needs to be a fully qualified host name, not a top level domain name.

Obviously you need to mirror your internal DNS settings as far as any alias or machine names you have set with your external DNS provider to point it all to your external IP address.

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Answer 3

Nov 22, 2012 5:11 AM in response to redshift82r

Hi Redshifts,

First a great big thank you for you brilliant answer.

Although I have read a book about DNS I still do not really understand how it works.

I created new primary zones as you said and aliases and now everything blinks green beautifully.

Thank you a lot.

Pierre

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Answer 4

Nov 23, 2012 12:03 PM in response to redshift82r

Strange enough...

On the host machine

Today when I rechecked the server app had " unexpectedly quit" .. and now the lights are RED again. Only the VPN light is green.

On a client machine within the same subnet

VPN green and the sites lights all RED?

Any hints where I could get more information WHAT to change?

Yours

Pierre

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Answer 5

Nov 23, 2012 2:54 PM in response to Pierre Froelicher1

Hi Pierre,

Probably unrelated.

My website lights are grey in Server.app as well. It's only on entry that they are green.

Also , remember Server.app is a "wrapper" for easy administration of settings, not the actual "server" services. These are run in the background by the servermgr daemon. So if it unexpectedly quits, the services should still be running.

However, that said, it isn't normal behaviour.

The order you set up the services in Server.app is really important, so adding the extra Dns zones after everything else might cause some problems.

A good "fix all" operation is to sometimes do the following.

Select the server itself in the left hand pane of server.app, select "Network" in the Right hand pane, and reset the host name by following the dialogue. Leave the host name as you have set it originally, but server.app will then reset that name through all of the services.

Cheers

Gerry

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