You may need to change the paths for your installation but this should work quite well.
As allways take a backup before you run this just in case.

Yet another nail in the media revolution coffin. Lets hope Jobs will cheer every one up next week.

I have also recently moved to another new server with more power and before it was really commissioned we purchased its replacement well this server will become a fail over node but that isn’t important. And we are now running ISPCP in anger. we have had to make several changes to the system to make it work the way we need and want it to but nothing to dramatic.  More info on ISPCP issues to follow.

Here is a little diagram of what we are trying to achieve.

the servers go here.

The Master server is an ispCP box running several domains.

The Secondary server can also be an ispCP box with its own domains on or it could be just a bind server just for secondary DNS.

The Tertiary server is the same as the secondary server.

The zones for the domains running on Master are created automatically on the Master server but need to be transferred to the other two servers. Here is steps that we took to achieve this.

First off we need to create a user on all of our servers that will be used to do the transfer.
useradd -g bind -m -p password dnstrans

This will add a user called dnstrans in the group bind.

Next we need a script that will make the config file for the secondary servers this needs to be edited differently from the master servers config file. We found a script that was written to do the job but we found it not to work quite right. Here is a copy of our script.

#!/bin/bash
# Replace "x.y.z.w" with the IP address of your master DNS
MASTER=x.y.z.w
DB_PATH=/var/cache/bind/
user=dnstrans
group=bind
file=/home/$user/`hostname`sec
echo "#start" > $file #empties transfer file
pushd $DB_PATH # changes to directory path and stores pwd
#ls -1 *.db | awk -v m=$MASTER -v path=$DB_PATH '{ print gensub(/(.*)\.db/,"zone\"\\1\" { type slave; file \""path"/manual/\\1.db\"; masters { "m"; }; };", g,$9); }'
ls -1 /var/cache/bind/ |gawk -v m=$MASTER '{print gensub(/(.*)\.db/,"zone \"\\1\" { type slave; masters { "m"; }; file \""path"\\1.db\"; };",1) }' >> $file
chown $user.$group $file
popd # pops back to pwd

Place this script in /usr/local/sbin/trans. It will also need to be made executable with the following

chmod +x /usr/local/sbin/trans

This script will output a file the the dnstrans home called “xxxsec” were xxx is the host name of the master DNS server that has created this file. This will be the file that we need to transfer to the secondary servers.

Next we automate the creation of this file every hour using crontab.

crontab -e
02 * * * * /usr/local/sbin/trans

This will run at 2 minuites after the hour every hour.

That is it for the master server next we need to configure our secondary servers.

We have to pull the file that has been created to our secondary server with this script.

#/bin/bash
cd /etc/bind/
wget ftp://dnstrans:password@master.server.tld/betasec --passive-ftp #download the zone file
rndc reload #reload the dns domains

We also need this file to be placed in /usr/local/sbin/getdns and it will need to be made executable.

chmod +x /usr/local/sbin/getdns

This will pull the file to the secondary DNS servers /etc/bind/ folder. Next we need to edit the secondary DNS servers config to include the new file this is done with this command.

echo 'include "/etc/bind/hostnamesec";' >> /etc/bind/named.conf.local

Last off we need to automate the pull of the file this is done with a cron job on the secondary server as bellow.

crontab -e
09 * * * * /usr/local/sbin/getdns

This job will run at 9 minuites after the hour every hour.

John has also done a wright up of this project and as he did most of it his is probably better than mine so here is the link to his.

IspCP is a branch of the VHCS project but it is a bit more of a welcoming project with a lot more activity on the development side of things.

This howto will also work with Debian Sarge.

This is a scripted install of ispCP so after the first few commands all you have to do is answer the questions.

In this howto I have started off with a clean install of etch with only openssh-server installed.

Login as root and change to root directory.
# cd /root
Download the mini install script from here.
Un-tar the mini install.
# tar -xvzf ispcp-omega-mini-installer-latest.tar.gz

Remove the tar file after extraction for house keeping.
# rm rm ispcp-omega-mini-installer-latest.tar.gz

Change to the extracted directory.
# cd ispcp-omega-mini-installer-0.5/

Run the install script (from here on its just a case of answering the questions).
# ./ispcp-omega-mini-installer-0.5.sh

You will get this menu:
Welcome to ispCP Omega mini installer.
Please, select your operative system
1) Debian Sarge 3) Gentoo 5) Ubuntu 7) Other
2) Debian Etch 4) Fedora 6) OpenSuSE
#?
Type 2. you will then be prompted to install a package called dialog.
Dialog was not found on your system.
Want me to install it? [Y/N]
Typey to install dialog.
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
The following NEW packages will be installed
dialog
0 upgraded, 1 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 216kB of archives.
After unpacking 1221kB of additional disk space will be used.
WARNING: The following packages cannot be authenticated!
dialog
Install these packages without verification [y/N]?
Type y again at the apt screen to install dialog.

If asked install Bzip2.

Select the install you want to try for a more stable install I recommend Release Candidate until there is an official stable release. If you want to test the latest release go for a nightly build though it might be a bit buggy.

The script will then download your chosen version.

You will be asked to add some new reposes to the source.list select yes for default though it will try and download all packages then from Germany if you have the default .debian.org sources for your country set-up already I would stick with them it will be faster.
You will be asked if you want to install all the dependencies take note of the config options you need to make and select yes.
Then it will install ispCP and will ask you some info about your domain name for the hosting front end and the ip of the server this needs to be the live internet ip just in case your server is behind a NAT firewall.
I will make this more detailed as ispCP is developed but I think it might change quite a bit in the near future.