Create new customer without domain

[lpittman]

I recently upgraded to Plesk 10 and am having issues with Customers/Subscriptions - some help would be appreciated.

In my previous config I had one main account for all "my" domains, then 4 other accounts for my "resellers". In the domains I could easily setup domain admin access and everything was great.

In the transition to Plesk 10 all the domains that were under my main account all got setup with their own "subscription" (whatever the hell that is supposed to be) and all the "user" accounts are all thrown in to one big basket. Now, when a "domain administrator" logs into the control panel, they see every domain that is under my main account (which is now a "customer").

Okay - so my previous config wasn't setup ideally for the new model - so I figured I would run through and just create accounts for each of my customers (under customers) and transfer over the subscription to that customer then when they login they'll only see their own "stuff" ... well, that is pretty much impossible. You cannot create a new account without a user, domain, etc ... however all the users and domains I would use already exist in the server.

So, someone please help a brother out here - how the heck do I go about cleaning this mess up? It is causing a huge headache.

Thanks
Luke

 

[lpittman]

A reply from someone at Parallels would be great.

 

[madsere]

I had the same problem and found that if you use /usr/local/psa/bin/client it will let you create a customer without having to create a domain.

Epic Fail to Parallels for not allowing this to happen through the GUI.

 

[EduardoG]

Same problem here.
I have a customer who owns 3 subscriptions. I want to separate one of them and assign it to other subscriptor, but I need to create that subscriptor so I can move my subscription.
I cannot create a new customer as I must enter a subscription data, even when a subscription for this user already exists in the system.
What were you thinking on, parallels? Is this a beta stage or a joke? Did you really tried this software in the real world?

 

[Benjamin Pichler]

Same problem for me!

 

[lhwparis]

vote for this feature too!

 

[lpittman]

I had the same problem and found that if you use /usr/local/psa/bin/client it will let you create a customer without having to create a domain.

Epic Fail to Parallels for not allowing this to happen through the GUI.

Thanks for the reply - it is a start - however the clients I need to create are already setup as users (with email addresses) in the system, thus I am getting the following error:

[root@server bin]# ./client -c <user_name> -name "<customer_name>" -email "<email_address>" -passwd "<password>"
An error occurred while creating an account: User with such e-mail address already exists in the system.

Any ideas on how to deal with this?

 

[madsere]

email parameter is not required, just remove that, then it'll go through.

Just received information from Parallels that a "feature request" has been issued to be able to do this through the GUI.

 

[lpittman]

Thanks man.

I've got that to work - however now when I change subscriptions to that "client" they cannot edit the users in the admin area. When clicking on the link to the user under the "Mail" tab we get the following error:

Error: The user account was not found. This could happen if the user account was removed by someone else while you were changing its settings.

This is ridiculous.

 

[madsere]

This is ridiculous.

I agree. They should test their software better before releasing it.

 

[KirkM]

Truly amazing that is could occur in a released product. This shouldn't be a "feature request" as much as a major deficiency to be addressed immediately. I agree with @EdwardoG, did they not even use this on the most basic operations? This would have been obvious right from the start to anyone using it in the most basic setting.

 

[KirkM]

Any chance that maybe a backup and restore would allow us to re-define the roles so we can change subscriptions to customers? Just throwing things out here before I have to give up and go to another panel. I can't do business with this broken new version.

 

[madsere]

Actually I found, although you can create a "customer" using the CLI, once that is done there is still no way to move this customer into a resellers account.

Mega fail this time, Parallels.

 

[KirkM]

Can you create a customer from an existing subscription that works as a separated control panel if you don't need it to be a reseller? This new structure is way too convoluted.

 

[madsere]

You can create a new customer using the CLI and then associate a subscription (domain) to this using the GUI. This allows the customer to access the CP for just his domain.

 

[KirkM]

Unfortunately, most of my subscriptions (domains) have dedicated IP's. The GUI won't let you take an IP along with the domain that is using it over to a new customer if it isn't assigned to the customer. But you can't reassign it to the new customer because it is being used by a domain. Catch 22. They have really done a good job in making sure this CP is pretty much useless.

 

[madsere]

Maybe you could get around it by temporarily change the IP to shared, just while you reassign the domain, then change it to dedicated again after? Just an idea.

 

[KirkM]

I did think of that. I will have to do some testing on my sandbox server and make sure it doesn't mess with the DNS. I have a bunch of eCommerce clients on the production server so I have to be absolutely sure it doesn't mess with their store's SSL / domain / IP relationship. What a mess!

 

[KirkM]

So, I got that to work but now there is another problem. The users aren't pulled over to the accounts with the email addresses, so the email login on the control panel doesn't work for the email owners:

The page isn't redirecting properly
Firefox has detected that the server is redirecting the request for this address in a way that will never complete.

It looks like moving subscriptions over in the GUI to new customers that were created in the CLI has a deficiency. Any ideas how to get the user -> email address associations back?

 

[KirkM]

OK, I got what initially looks like a working solution. I take no responsibility for unseen issues if you try this, but upon preliminary testing, it looks like it works.

TO MOVE SUBSCRIPTIONS TO A NEW CUSTOMER:

1. Use the CLI method to create the Customer:
- SSH into your server
- [root@secure ~]# cd /usr/local/psa/bin
- [root@secure bin]# ./client -c <login> -name "<Customer Name>" -passwd "<password>"
- You should see: SUCCESS: The user account '<login>' was created.

2. Log into your CP as admin and change the subscription to the new Customer (called "change subscriber" in in the CP)
- If you are using the server IP for this subscription, it will still say you need to remap the IP but will give you the only choice to remap to the same IP. This is fine, just leave it.

*************
FOR DEDICATED IP ON THE DOMAIN (subscription), you will have to first allow it to remap to the server IP (which will probably break your site temporarily in http, so work fast). Then go to the domain (subscription) settings and grab back that IP from your pool in the IP assignment drop down menu. It should be there as an available IP since you freed it up when you remaped to the server IP. The site probably went to the default page the server shows when a site isn't set up while you were doing this, but should be back online as soon as you re-assign the IP. CHECK IT!
*************
3. Now you have the problem of the users and their email addresses being left under the old Customer. I fixed that by going to the phpMyAdmin panel to change some settings.
- Click on the psa database
- Go to the "clients" table and note the id of the client you just created
- Go to the smb_users table and find all of the users that got left behind and need to be moved over to the new Customer.
- Change the field ownerid to the ID number you got from the clients table for all of the users you want over there.
- I noticed that the User Roles don't come across for things like mail user. It will be OK if you go and re-create any user roles that are missing in the new customer area.

Again, I don't know what land mines are in this workaround. I did a test on my sandbox and it seemed OK. That doesn't really tell what can go wrong in the wild, so I did it for a couple of my smaller cleints whom I know well and asked them to use their accounts as normal then let me know if they saw anything hinky.

Good Luck!