Floating IP always resolves to default page

[Drew_Linzmaier-Garratt]

We are in the process of trying out Floating IP on DigitalOcean to sit in front of our Plesk servers (https://www.digitalocean.com/compan...ting-your-applications-for-high-availability/). But have run into some issues with using the IP address provided as a shared address for sites within plesk.

Digital Ocean adds additional IP addresses to it's VPS instances via a IP address that is aliased to a Droplet's public network interface (eth0).

The two servers we are testing using this method are both running Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and Plesk 12.5 Webhost Edition.

Each servers Plesk admin is accessible via this second alias IP address. Once the second IP has been added to Plesk via Tools & Settings > IP Addresses we assigned a few test sites to this IP address as a shared address.

Unfortunately this is where things fell down. Even though our trace route for the IP address resolves to the correct domain name Plesk appears to always serve the default page regardless.

We also found that setting the "Public IP address" of serves main IP produced the same results.

Sort of feel like we have missed the obvious or that potentially it is not possible to use a aliased IP address in this way but any advice would be greatly appreciated.

 

[Drew_Linzmaier-Garratt]

Afraid I'm still struggling with this one and things just appear to be weirder.

While sites will only accept connections on the servers primary IP address we've found in our testing that both the Plesk panel itself and Webmail interfaces will work best when using the aliased address.

The aliased address is currently set to the "Public IP address" so this goes some way to explaining what we are seeing here but still does little to explain why sites are unable to correctly route traffic to anything but the default site page.

 

[nisamudeen97]

Hi,

I have also noticed the same behavior with plesk installed in Digital cloud server. I have contacted Digital cloud support.

 

[RobertHenry95]

Have either of you had success? I am facing the same issue and also using Plesk on DigitalOcean.

 

[Sergio Manzi]

I'm on DO too and I was fancying the same idea, but I think its is not feasible: I had a chat with commercial support (the omnipresent "Lucy") and she said this kind of configuration is not supported.

What I did is to create two droplets (and for added resilience I choose to have them in different regions, something you can't do with floating IPs)
I set up some cron jobs to rsync between "live" and "failover" sites and import DB dumps.
In DNS I have my A and CNAME DNS records set to 300 (btw I use external DNSs, some on AWS Route53, some on my usual registrar and I don't use Plesk for DNS configuration).
I keep my finger crossed until the sh*t hit the fan.
Then I quickly change my DNS zones to point to the failover site.

Next thing to do would be to automate the DNS switching. Easily feasible using Route53 API, more difficult for my registrar's DNS.

At the end, I'm fancying to further automate by launching the DNS switching scripts in response of AWS Health Checks.

 

[RobertHenry95]

Hmm ... I wonder why it can't be supported? It seems like what we're trying to do is relatively common.

I will investigate your method and see if it can be of use in my application. If one were to automate the DNS switch, as you mentioned, that would be a great workaround.

 

[KDawson]

I just ran into this problem and worked through to the solution with Plesk Level 2 support.

Digital Ocean's floating IPs are mapped via an internal "anchor" IP. In the Plesk UI, go to Tools & Settings > IP Addresses. On a new DO Droplet you should see two IP addresses: the public one for your Droplet, and an internal one. (Mine was 10.10.0.5.)

Click on the internal IP and add the address of the floating IP (as assigned by DO) into the "External IP Address" field. Declare it dedicated or shared, assign an SSL certificate if desired, and click OK.

Now in Domains > [your domain] > Hosting Settings, make sure the domain's IP address is set to the floating one.

No more default Plesk page for domains using Digital Ocean's floating IP.

The support tech who figured this out with me created this KB article:

How to configure Plesk behind NAT
How to configure Plesk behind NAT

 

[Netlichter]

Hi,

could someone provide me a screenshot with settings? I struggling with the same problem.

Big thanks.

 

[ststudios]

I just ran into this problem and worked through to the solution with Plesk Level 2 support.

Digital Ocean's floating IPs are mapped via an internal "anchor" IP. In the Plesk UI, go to Tools & Settings > IP Addresses. On a new DO Droplet you should see two IP addresses: the public one for your Droplet, and an internal one. (Mine was 10.10.0.5.)

Click on the internal IP and add the address of the floating IP (as assigned by DO) into the "External IP Address" field. Declare it dedicated or shared, assign an SSL certificate if desired, and click OK.

Now in Domains > [your domain] > Hosting Settings, make sure the domain's IP address is set to the floating one.

No more default Plesk page for domains using Digital Ocean's floating IP.

The support tech who figured this out with me created this KB article:

How to configure Plesk behind NAT
How to configure Plesk behind NAT

I appreciate the follow up and advice, but this still doesn't seem to be working with DO Floating IPs. Going to forgo using one until Plesk seems to have a more solid KB setup for it. (The article you linked is no longer accessible.)

 

[Kaspar]

@ststudios

See:

Running Plesk Behind a Router with NAT

If your Plesk server is behind NAT, you can match private IP addresses on the server to the corresponding public IP a...

docs.plesk.com

and

Website shows Plesk default page in a Plesk server behind NAT

Applicable to: Plesk for Linux Plesk for Windows Symptoms Domain example.com shows Plesk Default Page or Default Apache Page (Default Webserver Page), or "took too long to respond" Plesk ser...

support.plesk.com