 Hey everybody, my name is Tim Owens. I'm the co-founder of Reclaim Hosting. And I'm Meredith Fiero, the team lead for Reclaim Hosting as well, support team lead. And today, we're going to be talking about common troubleshooting tips for domains. As you're supporting your domains program, there's likely going to be lots of different questions on various things. Obviously, the domains program, as with any type of web hosting situation, can have lots of different variables, lots of different scenarios, people running lots of different software. And that can be really scary at first. So we like to really talk about what are the things that you're going to see the most and how do you fix those kind of things. So let's get right into it. The first thing that I'm going to talk about are just sort of some basic troubleshooting steps. These are like, can apply to almost any scenario. And there's a couple of things that we're going to do. We're going to talk about clearing your browser cache and what that actually means. We're going to talk about, you know, trying a different browser or a network and attempting to recreate the issue. So those are sort of the three things that I want to touch on. The first one is clearing a browser cache. So caching can be a real issue here. And the problem is that browsers try to get really smart. They want things to go fast, especially things like Google Chrome. When you load a website, it's actually loading parts of it in the background on the actual browser. And so what happens is then your browser is trying to be really smart. And next time you go to it, it wants to load stuff from its cache. And that can cause issues if someone says, well, I wrote a new post and something's not showing up right, or they're editing HTML and they're saying, I'm still seeing the welcome screen on my homepage instead of the WordPress site I installed or whatever the case may be. Typically, the first thing we tell people is, have you tried clearing your browser cache? We've got a great website here. It's called Refresher Cache. And what I like about it is it gives instructions on how to do it on all the various different browsers. And so this is a site we like to send people and say, hey, try clearing your browser cache first and see if the issue goes away. It can kind of be like a one-size-all fix for issues of that kind. The other issue with caching is maybe you want to try, you know, a different browser or a different network. So that can be another fix, too. Maybe you've got a lot of stuff saved in Chrome. Open up Safari or open up Firefox and say, is the same issue happening there? And then the other thing I tell people is try and recreate the issue yourself. So, you know, for example, if somebody says, when I log in, I get this screen, you should have options and we'll talk about them a little bit later about how you can, or I believe Lauren and Jim have talked about this, about how you switch to different users and WordPress. Try logging it as them and see if they have the same issue. So those are kind of the three basic troubleshooting steps. Another basic thing that comes into play here is login and password management. So there can be a lot of logins that I found in the domains program. So you've got a couple different ones here. And I think this is really important for people to understand the difference between all of them. The first one is how they're logging into the domains program as a whole. And hopefully you're one of the schools that has built in single sign-on. So when they're logging into their domain site, they're using their school credentials. That makes things very simple because you don't have to, as an administrator, worry about resetting passwords for people, knowing what their passwords are. You leave that all to the identity management folks at your school or your institution. So that can make it really simple and for them, they use their password for everything from probably buying dinner at the dining hall to logging in and buying textbooks or signing up for classes. So that's an account that they know about and they can easily log into it. But that's just for the main WordPress site. And that can confuse some folks because there's other credentials that are out there. One of them is they'll get emailed a set of cPanel credentials. And what the heck are those? So that is your primary cPanel account that you get when you sign up for an account. For users in a domains program, that typically takes the form of using SSH or SFTP. So if they're uploading files using an FTP program, that's when they're going to have to use that account. It's going to be completely different from their single sign-on account. And it's really just used for FTP and they can reset it on their own within the cPanel system. And then the third set of credentials is when they go to install an application. For a lot of people, this is going to be WordPress, but it could be Omeka, it could be Scalar. And when they go to install software, it's going to say create an admin account. And they'll have to set a username and password. If they're moving too quickly through that, it may just set some default credentials for them. And then they might try to log in with their single sign-on credentials or their cPanel ones. And then they'll get frustrated and go, why can't I log into my website? Luckily in Installatron, you may have noticed this. The WordPress installs that people do, it will sign them in automatically when they're going through cPanel. So that's one nice feature of Installatron, but that doesn't carry over to any of the other applications that are Installatron. So if you're installing Splots, if you're installing Scalar or Omeka, it's really important to know what account you set. And you can go in there and you can change it if you need to. So it's logins and password management are really tricky. We often recommend when you're doing any kind of workshops or training for people that you really hammer in how important it is. I always like to encourage people to use some kind of password management tool, whether that be one password or last pass, something for them to be able to save credentials so that this becomes less of a headache, because it can be really frustrating. The next thing that I kind of want to take a step back on and talk about is just how you handle errors in the system. So somebody comes and they say, my website is broken. It's like, okay, well, in what way? So you go to load the site and sometimes different applications will show you errors, but they're very generic. So on the left here, I've got a very basic WordPress error. There's been a critical error. Thanks, you know, I don't know what that means. Omeka says it's encountered in an error, but you really have no idea what's going on. So cPanel has some great tools in there that can kind of help you dive in and understand where those errors are and how to handle them. So the first place that you can check is actually, it's called errors. It's under the metrics section in cPanel. And if you go to the errors page, it combines all the error logs from within a person's cPanel account and it shows them in reverse chronological order. So if an error is showing up on a website, you might get more information from this page. In a lot of cases, we see with WordPress in particular, but sometimes with Omeka as well, that it might be a bad plugin or a theme that's causing errors. And if you look in this error log here, it will give you information about it. It'll tell you the path to the file that's throwing the problem. So this is a good place to kind of see like, okay, you've got a generic error, but is it being caused by a plugin or a theme or something like that? And then you can go and you can turn that plugin or theme off by just renaming the folder in the system. You'll also find that the files that this is pulling from, especially for PHP errors, are going to be in a file called error underscore log. Now that's in your file manager. So if you go under the file manager and so, for example, if someone's loading their main website and that's the one that's having a problem, that file would live in public underscore HTML here. And you could open up the file, you can download it and scroll back in time to see if the error, if somebody said the error was happening yesterday, you could download the file and maybe look back in the timestamps on it. So this is a way to go back in the file and get a sense of what's going on in there. And then of course, since you're in the file manager, if it is a plugin or theme, you could go into the plugins folder and you could just rename that plugin and that would disable it on the system and allow the website to load back online. So I think handling errors is really important because it's a way for you to get a better sense of what exactly is going on in the system, what's broken or what's not and things like that. And now I'll pass it off to Meredith. Yeah, sounds good. So I'm just going to go through some of the basic troubleshooting you might get from a student that's running into issues and the first one happens when a student gets a blank cPanel. This can be just a white screen or a cPanel login box with the username and password. The fix is pretty simple. We just sync the password between WHMCS and WHM itself. This is the cPanel and FTP password to reference earlier. So what you want to do is take note of the user email or the name, log into WHMCS and then on their product and services page, there is a little box for the password. I've marked it out on mine now just for privacy reasons but there's also these module commands and you can do a bunch with them. Korean and account, suspend, terminate, all that sort of stuff. But we want to change the password to sync between WHMCS and WHM. So just click that box. A little green box at the top will appear that the change has been fixed and then you can then switch back to the user and have them try logging in again. This usually works and they get logged right in right away from there. So and then a lot of times we find that students and club members or that sort of thing have a project that they're working on or have a club website that have multiple admins and so they need access to cPanel. And unfortunately cPanel doesn't have a great way to have multiple users manage one cPanel at a time. So we've kind of come up with a way to get around that within the user dashboard. This involves creating a new order for each person within their WHMCS profile. So this happens when the order exists on the server. So you'll want to make sure that each club member or project member have logged into the WordPress site. The main WordPress site to create an account and then you'll go in and create a new order for the URL in question. So this happens on the summary page under product services, the little box there with the arrow. Then you'll want to fill out the desired URL under the domain section and make sure to select a product and service. There's usually just one option like account or your project name account and that sort of thing. This gives the cPanel account the proper package when you're creating the order. You also want to make sure to uncheck the boxes underneath order status. We don't need to generate any invoices or anything like that since billing is only... There's no billing involved within WHMCS. And then you'll click submit order there on the right. You'll get this accept order screen, this order page. If the account exists on the server, you'll see I haven't read here these two check boxes. You'll want to make sure to uncheck those because that will run into some errors when creating the order because the order already exists. The account already exists on the server. We don't want to recreate it. So uncheck those boxes and then the green accept order button that will then put the order into an active status on the particular user. And then they will have the record of it in their account. Then the student sees a dropdown box on the bottom left of their dashboard which they can use to then switch back and forth between the accounts. It'll refresh the page and then show them a new dashboard for the particular account. So this is really handy if there's multiple... Like a group project or anything like that or if there's a club site that someone wanted to create. It allows the account to be spread out over multiple people and then that way there's no risk of an account getting accidentally terminated after the club president graduates or something like that. It's maintained across the board. So the next one is changing a primary domain. We see this often all the time. Maybe a project name has changed. Someone's changed their name. They just don't like the URL they chose at first. We can change that easily within WHM and this happens on WHM CS as well. So we start first in WHM. You'll want to log in and click list accounts. On the left sidebar you can just search list there and click the button. And then you'll want to search for the old domain first in the search bar. It's in the middle of the screen. You'll want to click find and then it'll bring up a list of the accounts hopefully the particular one you're looking for. To modify the account then to get the new domain in the system you'll want to click the little tiny plus button next to the domain name on the left. It'll bring down some more options and you'll click modify account. Then it'll bring up a list of like different settings about the package and the account itself. You'll only want to change the primary domain name box. That's really important because if you change the cPanel username or any other settings on that page it could break the account. So you'll only if you're changing the primary domain you'll only want to change that first box where it says primary domain to the new domain. Meredith are there situations after a domain is changed where someone might have to go back and fix something or I mean does everything just automatically work or does that kind of depend on what they're running? That's a great question. It depends on what you're running. So usually if it's just one WordPress install or like Omega install installed on the main domain like newdomain.com or meredithfiero.com the cPanel automatically changes everything over which is great. But if you're running subdomains through installatron so if you're doing like omeka.newdomain.com or scaler.newdomain.com this will actually have to be changed within installatron. They don't updating URLs and stuff like that Yeah, so you'll have to change those URLs so that's something to keep in mind before you make the change just make sure to go through the my apps and just check through just to make sure that there's not anything it is important to note that that doesn't apply to subdirectories so newdomain.com slash WordPress or anything like that that gets changed automatically great so yeah so then on this basic information page all the way down at the bottom you'll want to click save changes it's not shown in the screenshot because it would be a very very long screenshot for this all the way down at the bottom click save and that'll run the change domain system. So once that's done in WHM we're going to switch to WHMCS and go particularly to the product service page underneath the domain you'll paste in the new domain name and click save and that way we just have a record in WHMCS of the change and then that's it all you got to do is make the change from there and then the new the existing project will load on the new new domain so most domain of one's own schools have subdomains there's a few that do top level domains but students can use their own domain within domain of one's own if they'd like it can be registered anywhere with Google GoDaddy anything like that Reclaim Hosting definitely Reclaim Hosting so within the Reclaim Hosting sphere we have the two name servers so if the student has their domain registered outside of Reclaim Hosting you'll want to make sure that they update the name servers of the domain to the ns1.reclaimhosting.com and ns2.reclaimhosting.com that will then point the domain to the proper server and the DNS will do all its magic from there and then I guess that would be a scenario then where they could go back and change the primary domain if they ask the administrator like hey I've got this domain I signed up for the subdomain but I really want to use this one where they could just add it as a second domain in their account yeah exactly mm-hmm so and then finally if you're troubleshooting with a student and you just aren't getting anywhere you've exhausted all your troubleshooting efforts and you're just not sure where to go next we're always here to help so feel free to escalate a ticket or a question to us this is just a little list of what we'll need up front just so we can help you faster and get the get the student up and running quickly as well so we'll just need the URL that they're working with either just their username first name last name email in the system any screenshots of the errors they're reporting and troubleshooting shooting steps that they they have taken and you have taken just in a little summary of the page itself and we just ask that you continue to work with the student directly and be the liaison between reclaim hosting and the student we tried our best to help where we can but having the student work in particular work one-on-one with the student definitely does take some time and so we just ask that the admins be the be the one the person that we are in contact with of course unless you have an end user support agreement with us then we'll work directly one-on-one with the student that's right we do offer end user support we do that for some as well and so yeah and I think that's really important right like I think like support is like the elephant in the room for any administrator starting in the main program they're always like but what about support and what am I going to do and you know if the budget is there and they can do end user support that's great if it's not they're really afraid that all their time is going to be sucked into this and and I don't think it has to be something scary you know we're we're here to help and we're here to help them it's just we can't scale to tens of thousands of their students and offer it for everybody you know in that same way and so you know and I think it's something that there's a comfort level once you get into it you'll find that these common troubleshooting tips that we've mentioned are really some of the more often scenarios and you'll always come across something I mean I feel Merida you'll probably agree like we're learning every day like there's new stuff out there and something comes up you're like well I've never seen that one before and you know Google and Stack Overflow and all that various stuff is huge there's cPanel forums Omega has their own forums which I think are amazing some of the applications out there don't have as much support unfortunately and so but we do have good relationships with the developers so scaler is a good example where there's not a ton of documentation out there to help with but at the same time we have great experience working directly with the developers and sometimes we'll pass those on directly to the end users and stuff like that so I think it's not something to be afraid of you know it's some this is a great sandbox for a lot of schools and places to play and yeah things are going to break but that doesn't have to be a scary thing that can you know be something to be celebrated right that's where the learning begins is when something breaks for sure exactly exactly well thank you all for tuning in if you've got any questions or comments I'm sure the discord is quite active in there and we're looking forward to talking with you.