Root Access

[TomTomJnr]

As a relative novice, I’m having great difficulty setting up a GoDaddy Gen3 VPS server CentOS 7 + cPanel. What am I trying to do? Our main website is hosted on SiteSell (which doesn’t support software packages that use php). In the past we used an A2 server to host our downloads and Vibralogix Linklok Paypal to control emails and PayPal IPNs. My main objective, I want to repeat this using the GoDaddy server. I’ll add a couple of WordPress websites once downloads are operating successfully.

• Dashboard: - Settings, destroyed and rebuilt previous attempt that GoDaddy support were unable to help with. Clearing cache and selecting our URL displays Index of & cgi-bin. Using Filezilla/SFTP-SSH, I can gain access to the files.
• Set up nameserver DNS with (WHM). I used our website name and I remembered to add a trailing full stop. Settings were updated … can take up to 48 hours to update?
• Add my own host names: waited 48 hours but still quoting date of months ago.
  Instruction 6 says Enter the Host name and IP Address in the appropriate fields. Don't include your domain in the Host name field – it's already added for you. Don’t think this is correct, the host name is blank but the domain is included in the ip address field awaiting an ip address to be added.
• Change nameservers for my domains . Options: -
  a) Connect my domain to a website I've built
  b) Use GoDaddy default nameservers (recommended): option available if you're not currently using GoDaddy nameservers.
  c) Enter my own nameservers (advanced)
  Only a and c options were offered. Entered ns1.our_domain and ns2.our_domain Was displaying ns1.secureserver.net and ns2.secureserver.net: perhaps I should have skipped this step?
• Created CPanel
• Admin Root Access
  Server Dashboard/Settings (root & sudo) were already set as enabled.
• Check Root Access using putty
  Logging in as Server user name then typing sudo whoami displays root
  Logging in as admin (the CPanel account user name): -
  
  [admin@sXXX-XXX-XXX-XXX ~]$ sudo whoami
  We trust you have received the usual lecture from the local System Administrator. It usually boils down to these three things:
      #1) Respect the privacy of others.
      #2) Think before you type.
      #3) With great power comes great responsibility.
  [sudo] password for admin:                but typing the account password displays …
  admin is not in the sudoers file. 
  This incident will be reported.
  [admin@sXXX-XXX-XXX-XXX ~]$
• FTP Server Selection (WHM)
  Select Pure-FTPD
• FTP Server Configuration (WHM)
  Default settings changed: -
  Allow Logins with Root password - Yes
  Allow Anonymous uploads - Yes

Using Filezilla, the vps-user-name and admin directories are both located in the directory home. The directory home is in the root directory between the directories etc & lib. Neither of the users can upload to Root or Home directory. Both can upload welcome.html to their own directories but has no effect. Clearing cache and selecting our URL still displays Index of & cgi-bin. How do I get access to root to upload and install Linklok?

[PL281 · Accepted solution]

@TomTomJnr 

Just wondering if you had a VPS or just a cPanel server with A2.... that aside....

1) With a VPS server you can setup separate cPanel accounts for each site you want to host

2) By default Root SSH is disabled - this is different than Root Login - You would need to edit the SSH config file to enable this

3) In my own experience secureserver.net references are there just for setup purposes and are not configured to link the VPS to the GoDaddy DNS Management system.

4) If you want to use the VPS as a DNS server you certainly can you just need to use the host name feature in the DNS manager (https://dcc.godaddy.com)

5) Generally speaking - I use the terminal vs WHM vs direct SSH - I find it is more secure - you are in as root in that terminal window.

6) In terms of uploads - If you aren't going to use cPanel file manager - I suggest doing FTP as the cPanel user - otherwise you end up with ownership permissions that are all over the place and some files / elements won't run as they are owned by root vs the cpanel user for example