Frequently Asked Questions

1. My new website shows only the "Bytemark Unconfigured Host" page.

Simply upload a file to the root of your website directory, (such as /srv/www.example.com/public/htdocs/), with the name of index.html, or index.php`.

Your new index will override our default one.

2. I want http://example.com/ and http://www.example.com/ to show different content.

When we've created websites so far we've created directories without the www. prefix, for example /srv/steve.com. These directories are served when clients request both http://www.steve.com and http://steve.com. If you'd like different content simply create a new directory with the www. prefix added: 

  mkdir -p /srv/www.steve.com/public/htdocs/

3. What is the password for the admin user?

When the packages are installed a new local admin user is created. The password for that account will be same as for your existing root account. For all work with the virtual hosting packages we recommend you connect and login as user admin.

4. How do I redirect one domain to another?

We'll use a redirection of example2.com to example1.com, so that when users go to www.example2.com, they are redirected to www.example1.com. Firstly, create the example2.com htdocs directory as usual: 

  mkdir -p /srv/example2.com/public/htdocs/

Now inside that directory, create a file .htaccess with the following line inside: 

  Redirect 301 / http://www.example1.com/

and the redirection should start working. See the Apache documentation for a full description of the Redirect directive.

5. Help! My browser issues a big warning when I try to connect to my Webmail.

This is because the SSL certificate is self-signed. We've provided the following step-by-step guides to accepting this certificate permanently in some of the more popular browsers.

6. I want to get rid of the SSL certificate warnings. What is the best way of doing that?

We've not come up with a easy way of doing this yet, but it is on our To Do list.

7. I've set up the ftp-password as instructed, but I can't log in

The first thing to check is permissions. These need only be checked if you've created domains with the root user.

By default the Bytemark vhost package installs a new user admin which owns the /srv directory, and can create domains inside that directory. If you've set up the /srv directory by hand, it is probably owned by root, and any domains inside that directory will also be owned by root. This will prevent both the mail services and FTP services from running correctly.

To fix this, you need to create a user to own all the /srv/ directories. It is suggested that you create a user called admin, as this will fit into the Bytemark scheme. 

  adduser --home /srv --no-create-home admin

This command will prompt you for all sorts of information, including a password, and it will create a group called admin too. Once you've created this user, you will need to change the ownership of the /srv directory. NB this command assumes that all the domains in that directory are owned by root! 

  chown -R admin.admin /srv

8. When I restart Apache2 I get lots of warning about a VirtualHost mixing ports. How do I stop this?

The error looks like 

[error] VirtualHost 1.2.3.4:443 -- mixing * ports and non-* ports with a NameVirtualHost address is not supported, proceeding with undefined results
[error] VirtualHost 1.2.3.4:80 -- mixing * ports and non-* ports with a NameVirtualHost address is not supported, proceeding with undefined results
[warn] NameVirtualHost 1.2.3.4:80 has no VirtualHosts
[warn] NameVirtualHost 1.2.3.4:443 has no VirtualHosts

If you look in /etc/apache2/conf/virtual.conf and see an IP address matching the one in the error message, it should be commented out. So in this example /etc/apache2/conf/virtual.conf should look like: 

#
# We're running multiple virtual hosts.
#
# NameVirtualHost 1.2.3.4
#

If you now restart apache, you should no longer see those errors.

9. How do I modify the firewall, where is it located

We have a page of documentation on our firewall?