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Lost Subdomains And Redirects - No Help Received


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I was alerted by a user today that a redirect was not working on my site. I went to CPanel to investigate only to find that all of my redirects AND subdomains are gone.

 

I contacted Live Chat and was told to submit a trouble ticket.

 

I submitted the ticket stating that these were missing and could they be reinstated... and quickly received a reply. Unfortunately, the reply simply confirmed that yes, I have no subdomains or redirects and that I could set them up in CPanel. (um, yeah, I know where to set them up... I had them set up, and want to know why they are gone)

 

I replied to the response, admittedly a bit frustrated by the sense that tech support read the nouns in my request and sent a canned response rather than reading for content. I asked why the subdomains and redirects are gone, since I do not want to have this happen again. I am scouring my backups for some hint of what all was lost since I do not know by memory for whom I set these up, but am having no success.

 

The second response was essentially a paraphrasing of the first response. They checked, there are indeed none there, and I can recreate them.

 

I would feel more comfortable had tech support acknowledged that I have lost information on their service and some suggestion as to why it happened, what I could do to prevent it happening again, or where in my full backup I could find a list of the subdomains and redirects I had, in order to recreate them. (I admit, I became too frustrated to reopen the ticket to ask specifically where in my backup the CPanel information needed might reside.)

 

I recognize that quick tech support often requires canned answers to resolve what are all too often "user error" issues on first pass, but I do not believe this is a user error, and I an concerned that things are getting deleted. This makes me worry for the stability of my site. I do not know if anything else has been deleted, or if there is any way to rebuild the missing information from a backup.

 

The issue is not that I have to recreate these features. I will do so. It only takes a moment for each one, but since I do not have a list of what was there, I must send out a request to my users to notify me if they are missing a custom address. This is embarrassing and makes me and TotalChoiceHosting look bad.

 

Has anyone encountered this problem? (the lost setups, or unhelpful tech support?) Does anyone know where the subdomains and redirects are saved in the full backup? (cron jobs too?)

 

Thanks for any guidance.

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Welcome to the forum rbeforee ;)

 

I'm sorry you are having issues with your hosting and one with the help desk. I have someone looking into it and they will respond. But I must say, I have been with TCH for over five years now and subdomains just don't go missing.

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... and subdomains just don't go missing.

Yeah I can't even guess as to why they would be gone. Other CPanel stuff seems fine. I looked at the backup log (the completion confirmation e-mail) and see the subdomains get "saved" so I just keep hoping I will find a record of them. I already lost them last December when the site was suspended for outdated scripts letting evil hackers spam on our behalf (I hate learning the hard way about such things) and tried rebuilding them by memory. Tech support was very helpful in getting me back online, even though it was Christmas Eve and Christmas Day (yes, that is certainly how I wanted to spend my holiday, and I'm sure it was TCH's too) but i was unable then to figure out how to find those or the cronjobs in the backups.

 

If this gets resolved, I might even be able to go back and restore the older addresses... that would be icing!

 

Thanks in advance. It is simply reassuring to be heard.

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This is result of the re-provisioning performed on your account back in December, 2008, due to it being hacked via insecure scripts. All records are lost during this process and why we stated, "The account restore will bring your account back to a fresh state.The account restore will bring your account back to a fresh state. All data contained within the account will be deleted and will never again be accessible". I apologize if this was not made clear at the time of the re-provision.

 

After reviewing the logs prior to the compromise, I can only see that the following sub-domains existed:

binder

perez

wr

 

I have now added theses subs to your site, however, you will have to setup the redirects as they were stored in htaccess.

 

 

If you need any further assistance with this matter, please update your ticket and reference this thread.

 

Thanks

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Sorry I just noticed you said you were aware they were lost in December. If you can give me the name of at least one sub other than those I listed, I can then investigate further.

 

Thanks. I'm trying to remember the other subdomains, but I know that one of my redirects was from http://nsd.us/schools/iraharbison/classesira/ml (I am waiting for that teacher to send me the destination URL again... she is the one who alerted me to the problem, and as a result of her trying to create a work-around we decided to delete her directory until I have the destination... so that directory does not exist right now)

 

I believe there was either a sub or redirect for "survey" and possibly "board". I also believe at some point there were subs AND redirects for each school site (central, harbison, eltoyon, kimball... and on and on for ten schools) If that is not helpful I will have to spend some time asking around since my memory is next to useless.

 

Thanks tons for digging into this.

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Well still no word on the reason for the loss of information, but I feel much better knowing that although we can't be sure it won't happen again, barring my sight requiring reprovisioning again (which was due to an error on my part - ignorance) IF these items were to mysteriously disappear in the future, it sounds like I might have hopes of getting it back... of course, I am also going to begin a log of subdomains and redirects so I won't need anyone to find them again :thumbup: That is the real lesson to be learned, yes? But I am much more confident with the help I received after crying here. Many thanks to the forum moderators and the subsequent TCH techies that did the 'deeper delve' for me.

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