WP3.0.1 MS on Unix/Plesk cannot run subdomain

I HAVE submitted bug reports on this – several times, with detailed information including everything you an ipstenu requested, and every time, someone deletes the bug reports from trac. The WP dev community is in denial about this issue.

I find it hard to believe that the devs would delete tickets unless they were duplicates. My understanding is that the devs will close a ticket if the fault is not that of WordPress and they will certainly delete duplicates, but they won’t arbitrarily delete tickets.

I’m sure the devs had a good reason to dismiss your previous bug reports, and that reason should have been stated as a comment on the ticket.

If you link to your tickets here, that should draw some additional community attention and comments to them, which it sounds like you need to get the attention of the devs.

The devs can’t read everything posted to these forums, so complaining about it here won’t do you much good.

I HAVE submitted bug reports on this – several times, with detailed information including everything you an ipstenu requested, and every time, someone deletes the bug reports from trac. The WP dev community is in denial about this issue.

Since James answered you seriously – here’s my knee-jerk reaction – that is truly one of the funniest thing I’ve ever seen posted on these forums- I can’t thank you enough for that

@ mrmist – I HAVE submitted bug reports on this – several times, with detailed information including everything you an ipstenu requested, and every time, someone deletes the bug reports from trac. The WP dev community is in denial about this issue.

I’ve checked with one of the core devs about this and his response was that tickets are not deleted from trac.

Your tickets have been closed because they are not WordPress bugs. This happens quite a lot, to many tickets.

Closure does not equal deletion.

We don’t delete tickets. Only close invalid ones.

Okay, try this.

Delete WordPress but keep the wildcard domain stuff setup.

Betcha it’ll still be broken.

Set up wpmu 2.9.2. Make sure it all works. Now replace all the 2.9.2 files with 3.0 ones without touching anything else.

@ MacManX quote “My understanding is that the devs will close a ticket if the fault is not that of WordPress and they will certainly delete duplicates, but they won’t arbitrarily delete tickets.”
My experience is more that devs will close / delete (semantics) tickets if they don’t believe it is a fault of WordPress, and will continue doing so until sufficient people are pedanticly (sp?) re-reporting the same issues over and over again – hence my comment about denial – I have witnessed this phenomenon several times over the last three years.

quote “If you link to your tickets here, that should draw some additional community attention and comments to them, which it sounds like you need to get the attention of the devs.”
Now you’re just being facetious – how can I link to tickets that have been removed from the system, and which I therefore have no access to in order to obtain the links – think about what you say before you write it.

@ Samuel B – pointless, non-assistive comment, potential to provoke argument and acrimony – go read your own forum rules.

@ MrMist quote “Your tickets have been closed because they are not WordPress bugs. This happens quite a lot, to many tickets.”
The webmail hostname / subdomain works fully and without problems until WPMS network is enabled, then it gets treated by any browser-side call to/within the domain as a non-existing WPMS subdomain blog, and the user redirected to the WP registration and 404 page – this is happening regardless of hostname/subdomain sequencing in httpd.conf / vhosts.conf. The htaccess is exactly as created by WPMS.

Situation – webmail works. Install WPMS, webmail is redirected as a WPMS subdomain – ergo, it’s caused by activation of WPMS.
Alternative situation – your head feels fine, I smack you round the back of it with a bit of 2×2, your head hurts – ergo, the pain is caused by the application of the 2×2.
It’s that simple.

@ Nacin – same difference – you make them non-visible and unavailable for further comment by originating or additional users. Re: duplicates, then you need the “merge duplicates” function in trac.

@ ipstenu – have checked with the hosting techs (had to to be sure this has been tested) – nope – full deletion of WPMS including database, on the test domain, returned normal http access to webmail. They tried that a few weeks back.

@ Andrea – just checking – do you mean a straight FTP overwrite (or delete and rewrite) after 2.9.2 configuration, not an upgrade process? I think that may be one method we haven’t tried yet – but surely the ms-blogs redirector / parser file “thingy” (for want of a better name to give to Samuel B) will demand editing of htaccess, plus the additional “obfuscation” keys in wp-config being missing, will cause a non-startable WP build? Just guessing, but will give it a go – at this stage, any suggestion is worth a try … allow me a few days on that as I have a very heavy content creation schedule for several other sites this month, and everyone elkse this end is up to their eyes in pre-Christmas sales-season prep work for the entire sites list.

—- A reminder to all —- I missed including it in the OP of this thread, it was mentioned in other threads – and this one will do your head in as badly as it has done ours –
– If the WPMS build is done for subdomain blogs, but no wildcard setup in done server-side, then by MANUALLY creating the subdomains in DNS and pointing them to the domain root, everything works (sort of), but what a chore when a site may end up with 1000s of blogs and daily edits needed to DNS.
– As soon as WP instructions are followed for the server setup, all the above discussed issues occur – this IMPLIES the error is server side config – I agree that is the logical conclusion, EXCEPT – identical configs work on cPanel/Apache, they do not work on Plesk/Apache – everything else in Plesk, including other scripts, continue working fine … the prime problem is simply that normal browsing to named subhost/subdomain functions get grabbed by WPMS (e.g. webmail.domain / https://ftp.domain etc) <<- EDIT: dunno where that https:// in front of FTP is coming from, I didn’t enter it, and it’s not there when I edit the post – so save any sarcastic observation of it – it’s not me doing it !!!
– DNS for some reason, regardless of set settings, in the DNS manager, always returns the hosts list with the wildcard first – yeah, I know what that’s implying, but in the actual resolutions, the wildcard is last. Go figure – it’s got us stumped.

yes, yes, yes – I agree the implication is an incorrect config of the vhosts sequence – but the hosts and the Plesk support people have been over and over that, rejigging it every which way, and nothing makes any difference to the situation. Even to the point of them reworking cloud-wide configuration files chasing potential resolutions – nothing has resolved it.

I’ve now got three heavyweight site builds that have been on hold for six weeks due to this, plus a bunch of our own that have been shelved until this is sorted, and Lord knows how much of my time has been robbed from other projects and daily tasking in pursuit of a remedy for this. So if I seem a bit fractious, then apart from offering genuine apologies for it, I think you can understand why?

(And before someone comments or implies something contextual about it – yes, I am already hunting for a full-time technical interface person to manage liaison between us and you – it’s the “least contention” route to managing external relations with all the various open source communities whose products we implement. It will also immensely relieve pressure on my schedule.)

Gaz

Now you’re just being facetious – how can I link to tickets that have been removed from the system, and which I therefore have no access to in order to obtain the links – think about what you say before you write it.

Actually, I was thinking about what I wrote. Open a ticket, then open a topic here with a link to the ticket. Is that clear enough for you?

In retrospective, I made a mistake rescuing this topic from the spam bin. I thought that a few weeks might have improved your mood and we could have a constructive discussion on how best to proceed with your issue without you shooting down everyone who tries to help you. I guess I was wrong.

I read this whole thread, and the previous one…

The issue seems quite clear, and should be perfectly clear to anybody who knows DNS.

Short description of the problem:
-You have wildcard subdomains set up.
-You have some other subdomain (like mail.example.com) also set up. Presumably this subdomain is on some different server and thus has a different IP address.
-Going to this other subdomain sends you to WordPress instead.

Correct? Okay, if that is the problem, then the issue lies solely in your DNS configuration.

Before the browser ever makes it to your webserver (with WordPress on it), it has to do a DNS lookup. If your DNS is returning the IP of your wildcard instead of the IP of the defined subdomain, then the DNS is set up wrong. End of story.

Wild card entries should be at the end of your zone info, not at the beginning. If you do a nslookup on your subdomain, are you getting the right IP address?

That has nothing to do with WordPress. And if your host can’t get this right, then your host needs training. Or a manual. Or something. Just get a new host, it’s simpler.

Here’s an example of a zone db file with a wildcard. Notice how the wild card is at the end? That is intentional.
https://www.debian-administration.org/article/Wildcard_hosting_with_Apache_and_Bind

Long story short: Yes, WordPress will handle any requests sent to it in multi-site mode. But the request should never even reach WordPress unless your DNS tells it to go there. This is a problem outside the scope of WordPress entirely. Straight DNS (and possibly Apache VHOST, if you have both domains on the same server) issue.

Side note: This is yet another reason I never let my hosting services have my DNS. They have no idea what they’re doing. Use the DNS provided by your Domain Registrar instead, or setup a zoneinfo.com account, or something. Control your own DNS. You will be happier in the long run.

Otto – thanks for the input – and that’s exactly the premise and logic I have worked on throughout – it also what I have constantly communicated to the hosts, and they assure me they “get it”.

I don’t want to broadcast the IP address etc in a public forum, but I’m quite happy to PM the entire DNS zone record to someone from here whose alias is well known so they can double-check that things are as they should be from a WP perspective – I can send both the old A record + IP based zone, and the current CNAME-domain.tld version.

Like I said – I’m at the end of the line on this. I am right on the cusp of saying “sod WP 3” and rolling the multi-sites backwards to 2.9.2 and forking maintenance and development from there.

Sorry, but this last six weeks has been hell on earth due to this topic.

Frankly gazouteast you don’t do yourself any favours with your attitude around here and on trac.

If you make personal comments and allude to violence for no particular reason, it tends to make folk feel less inclined to help out.

To address your comment to nacin, deletion of a ticket and closure of a ticket on trac (for whatever reason) are not the same thing. All closed tickets are still available for comment and, indeed, should the need arise, available to be re-opened. (Not that I’d suggest simply re-opening a closed ticket without further evidence, because that would simply lead to ticket status ping-pong.)

To put this simply, if you have an existing sub-domain set up correctly in DNS, then there is no way that a correctly configured server would allow that domain to be intercepted by anything WordPress, because the requests simply wouldn’t end up at WordPress. (As Otto says in his post above mine.)

It suggests that something is wrong, either with the DNS config, or (if the wildcard and webmail end up at the same IP) the way that the Apache virtual hosts are being directed (check for any apache error logs about duplicate hosts.)

Apache error logs – duplicate hosts – will do – I have to shoot to a client site for a couple of hours – that check is top of the agenda when I get back – thanks

Email me with your setup and such. I’ll take a look, see if anything is obvious to me.

[email protected]

However, be assured: This is not a WordPress issue. It can’t be. WP does not do any special magic with DNS or VHOSTs. If you’re getting sent to the wrong place, then that happens before WP ever loads in the first place. No amount of changes to WP would ever cause the problem you’re describing. It’s just not possible. Web servers don’t work that way.

Otto – many thanks – you got mail

Have checked the error logs – there are zero errors since 31 July (when the More Privacy Options plugin was added to keep out search bots and splog registrations while configuring – yes the default “no search engines” and “no registrations” were enabled, but Google and Yandex were ignoring and getting past them (confirmed by access logs), and so did half a dozen sploggers.

Re the many comments about the wildcard entry must be last in VHOSTS – yes, I KNOW that – I have both 2.9. and 3.0.1 set up in MU/MS mode on the local LAN server under WAMP – I had that particular topic drilled pneumatically into my skull a long time back. I just hope I have hammered it enough in to the hosting techs head that his comments about it having been done, are genuine. (I don’t have access to httpd.conf or vhosts.conf but have asked for copies of them as they stand today).

Now re: Otto’s last post above, I am wondering if there’s mileage in putting redirect exclusions in the htaccess file, such that the named subhosts are not redirected to ms-files.php after an http request in the browser names them – – – how else can you browse to the login for https://webmail.domain.com ??? think about this please – – – this is a WEB PAGE in the WPMS controlled domain zone, yes, it SHOULD be above the wildcard in the VHOSTS list, but just in case it does not get picked up before hitting the wildcard ….. see my drift? Belt and braces principle.

Gaz

@ ipstenu – have checked with the hosting techs (had to to be sure this has been tested) – nope – full deletion of WPMS including database, on the test domain, returned normal http access to webmail. They tried that a few weeks back.

$20 says when your host uninstalled WP, they undid the wildcard entry too. Leave that up, but remove WordPress, is what I meant. You’d have to get explicit details on what they did. Which is why I love having a VPS, man. I make the edits myself, none of this back and forth BS.