Cloudron can't access dashboard because my Domains expired

[letecho]

Hi,

-I had installed last year on DigitalOcean with a Cloudron Droplet and configured DNS via Cloudflare Domains ect...

->Today the situation is the Domains was not renewed and the Setup DNS Cloudflare is full erased.

I have only the acces to the VPS console via DigitalOcean and i can access to the url IPV4: 142.93.48.34.

Can i do something to access to Cloudron dashboard & Can i reassigned a DomainName ?

Best regards.

[girish]

@letecho Do you still own the domain ? If so, all you have to do is to add a DNS entry manually from my.domain.com to the IP address. If you don't own the domain, just put an /etc/hosts entry from my.domain.com to the IP address. You can then access the dashboard via the browser.

Once you reach the dashboard, the certificate may or may not have expired. Accept the self-signed certificate and login. Then, go to the Domains view and you can add another domain, if you like and change the dashboard domain to that - https://docs.cloudron.io/domains/#dashboard-domain . You can also keep the same domain and sync DNS records instead as well - https://docs.cloudron.io/domains/#sync-dns

[letecho]

@girish
<<<<
Thanks a lot i found a solution.

Best regards

[scooke]

@letecho What did you do?

[Shai]

@girish I had the same problem as @letecho. @msbt sent me here.

I have tried putting the following into /etc/hosts

my.example.com 123.45.678.901

and

123.45.678.901 my.example.com

Also note that already in the /etc/hosts file, which I left untouched was:

127.0.0.1       localhost

Navigating in a browser to https://123.45.678.901 returns

You are seeing this page because this domain points to Cloudron server IP but no app is installed on that domain.

Ideas? thx.

[msbt]

@shai well yes, you have to navigate to the domain, not the ip address

[mehdi]

@shai said in Cloudron can't access dashboard because my Domains expired:

my.example.com 123.45.678.901

And remove the my.example.com 123.45.678.901 line from your hosts file. It's not valid and may cause issues

[Shai]

@mehdi Okay. But why would my.example.com work? And it does not. When the registration expired the Registrar disabled the DNS records for that domain which is normal. So how would associating an IP address with the domain name on /etc/hosts help that problem?

now that I think of it I should be able to access the Cloudron from Cloudron CLI. I'll go look to see if I can add domains and associate them to apps with Cloudron CLI.

I'll also look at @girish reference to the dns-sync documents.

Am I missing something?

[mehdi]

@shai It will not help with the SSL certificate. It helps with being able to have your browser connect to the interface : there is something called SNI ( https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Name_Indication ) , which makes your browser send the actual address you are trying to access, when trying to connect to the server's IP. This makes it possible to differentiate between websites on the same server. So if you try to access the raw IP, the server will not even try to send you the management interface : you have to put the my.example.com in the address bar, and the only way for that to actually contact the proper IP if the DNS is expired is the hosts file. You will still have to accept an expired certificate, but it should let you pass.

(if you still have trouble, I suggest trying a different browser / clearing the browser's cache, ...)

[girish]

@shai Let's say your old domain is olddomain.com and your new domain is newdomain.com . Then,

• You have to put "123.45.678.901 my.olddomain.com" in the /etc/hosts file of your PC/laptop (and not on the Cloudron server!)
• What the above does is that, when you access https://my.olddomain.com via your browser, the browser does not send any DNS request at all (so nothing hits your registrar). Instead, it looks up that file and translates to your server IP. This is why it "works". But of course, this will work only on your PC/laptop and won't work from any other laptop/machine.
• Note that https://123.45.678.901 won't work . This is expected since access via IP won't work on Cloudron. You have to access using a domain name. (Both SNI and vhost configuration require domain names).

Once you have access to the dashboard:

• Add newdomain.com in the Domains view.
• Change the dashboard domain - https://docs.cloudron.io/domains/#dashboard-domain
• Move all apps to use the newdomain.com
• Delete olddomain.com from Cloudron Domains view.

[Shai]

@girish So clever! Worked like a charm.

The only part where I had to fuss for a few minutes is that the app errored on changing to the new domain; it got stuck on de-registering the old domain. I went into the Domain manager and deleted the domain entirely from the Cloudron and then the app was able to receive the new domain without problem.

Thank you so much for writing the steps out in detail. I really appreciate it!