Setting up a cPanel account for the root domain

Ichiban

Member
I signed up for my VPS and specified knownhost.mydomain.org as my hostname. Now, I'd like to create a cPanel account through which to manage mydomain.org, mostly to setup a website at www.mydomain.org.

When I try to add a cPannel account for mydomain.org via WHM, I get the following error:

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Account Creation Status: failed

Sorry, the domain 'mydomain.org' is already setup (remove it from httpd.conf with '/scripts/killvhost mydomain.org', and be sure to excise it from /var/cpanel/userdata/)

=====

Now, I'm fairly sure I don't want to remove mydomain.org from httpd.conf. :)

How should I go about adding a cPanel account to manage mydomain.org? Should I just add one specifically for www.mydomain.org? Should I have the VPS switched to a different domain name which won't be used for webhosting? Along those lines, would it be possible to move the VPS to a sub-domaiin of mydomain.org (say knownhost.manage.mydomain.org) and thus free up the root domain for account creation?

Sorry, lots of questions there. I'm sure this is a pretty common request, but Google wasn't really my friend in trying to resolve this. Anyone who's been through this, I'd appreciate your guidance.

As always, thanks for reading!
 
I signed up for my VPS and specified knownhost.mydomain.org as my hostname. Now, I'd like to create a cPanel account through which to manage mydomain.org, mostly to setup a website at www.mydomain.org.

When I try to add a cPannel account for mydomain.org via WHM, I get the following error:

=====

Account Creation Status: failed

Sorry, the domain 'mydomain.org' is already setup (remove it from httpd.conf with '/scripts/killvhost mydomain.org', and be sure to excise it from /var/cpanel/userdata/)

=====

Now, I'm fairly sure I don't want to remove mydomain.org from httpd.conf. :)

How should I go about adding a cPanel account to manage mydomain.org? Should I just add one specifically for www.mydomain.org? Should I have the VPS switched to a different domain name which won't be used for webhosting? Along those lines, would it be possible to move the VPS to a sub-domaiin of mydomain.org (say knownhost.manage.mydomain.org) and thus free up the root domain for account creation?

Sorry, lots of questions there. I'm sure this is a pretty common request, but Google wasn't really my friend in trying to resolve this. Anyone who's been through this, I'd appreciate your guidance.

As always, thanks for reading!

I'd recommend opening a support ticket about this. There should be no conflicts if your hostname is host.mydomain.com and you want to create a cPanel account using mydomain.com - something has definitely gone awry here and without specifics and logging in and looking around it'd be a shot in the ark at best here in the forum.

It might be useful at the resolution of the ticket to post the resolution to your specific issue here in the forum for those who might run into the same issue in the future :)
 
Thanks Jonathan. Knowing it should work put me on a fast path to the root cause.

After seeing your reply, I went over what actions I might have taken which both involved my root domain name and varied from the vanilla WHM configuration. That pretty much narrowed it down to installation of my own Comodo SSL cert to secure WHM\cPanel. When I reset WHM to generate it's own cert, I was then able to add my root domain as expected.

I'm pretty sure I assigned the SSL cert to my root domain when I installed it into WHM, so I'm guessing that's the part that caused the vhost conflict.

I was planning to implement Matt's suggestion regarding my SSL cert questions (http://forums.knownhost.com/threads/ssl-cert-re-use-question.2669/) tonight anyway, so this all worked out well. I'll post back regarding my final, working configuration, but it looks like setting up WHM with a custom SSL cert on the root domain was the culprit here.
 
Looks like another contributing factor was a lingering SSL site I somehow configured for the root domain. Not sure if that was left over from previous efforts to install the root domain as a user account and configure it for SSL. I...did a lot of stuff when I was first finding my way around WHM. :)

To get to a working config, I removed all vestiges of previous SSL certs, returing the WHM services to their self-gen'd certs in the process. I then installed the Comodo cert for the WHM service, overriding the default domain to be knownhost.domain.com. I then created domain.com as a cPanel account and installed the same Comodo cert into it using the SSL Hosts section of WHM. Everything looks to be working as hoped/expected, so I'm a happy camper. Now, on to my much delayed migration.

Thanks again for the help!
 
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