I added a domain name to an account on one of my DirectAdmin-managed servers yesterday, and when I came to tweak some of its settings a few hours later it had mysteriously disappeared from the domains list in the control panel! (I think this was due to a dirty restart of the core DirectAdmin program, but I'm still not 100% sure). What was strange was that all the files (private and public_html) were still there if I FTPed in, the domain still resolved and loaded if I typed in its URL into a browser - but I couldn't access the control panel settings for it (so no email, no MySQL management etc). A crippled domain.
Even more frustratingly, attempting to rename/delete the domain's folder via FTP or SSH didn't work, and I couldn't re-add the domain to the account as DirectAdmin could (bizarrely) still see that it was already hosting it! Moving/deleting the domain's DNS zone file didn't work, and neither did a DirectAdmin restart. So, Catch 22... What to do? Continue reading "Tiplet: Recovering a 'ghost' domain in DirectAdmin"