Multiple DotNetNuke Portals and IX Webhosting

[kamau]

Hi, first of all thanks for setting up this forum, I don't know why IX have not setup one of their own yet they are a great tool for support.
Anyways, my problem lies with dotnetnuke. I've installed it on one of my domains and now I'm trying to setup portals for my other domains and I can't seem to get it to work. I tried getting help ove Live Chat but they don't really seem to know what I'm talking about.
Let me explain.
I've got 2 domains lets call them domain1.com and domain2.com
i've installed dotnetnuke in a subfolder on domain1.com\dotnetnuke.
Within DNN i've got 2 portals, the default is for domain1.com and the other is for domain2.com. Both portals work fine, problem is mapping www.domain2.com to the portal within domain1.
I've tried using directory indexes but when I try to navigate to www.domain2.com I get the error "Directory Listing Denied". If I navigate to the true url, www.domain1.com/dotnetnuke/domain2 then it works fine. I've added the portal alias in DNN and according to the documentation, that's all I need to do.

So my question is, has anyone got dotnetnuke running multiple portals with ixwebhosting? If so, how did you get it to work.

Thanks in advance
John

[vuppili]

Hi Mr Kamau,

I am just trying to install DNN in ixwebhosting servers. Can you please guide me how to go about this as this the first time I had to do it for one of my small time customer. Any help in this regard will be great! Thanks

[kamau]

Installing dotnetnuke is fairly easy. I'll explain the steps one by one. Note that i"m explaining assuming that you are using dotnetnuke 4.0.8 (currently the latest version).

1. Create your sql database and user from the IX control panel.
2. Download and unzip your dotnetnuke (dnn) setup on your local machine.
3. The default connection string in web.config are for SQL Express 2005, you must change this to a connection string for SQL Server 200/2005. There are two of them that must be changed. The first one is in the ConnectionStrings section, as shown below. I've commented out the first one and enabled the second one.


<connectionStrings>
<!-- Connection String for SQL Server 2005 Express
<add
name="SiteSqlServer"
connectionString="Data Source=.\SQLExpress;Integrated Security=True;User Instance=True;AttachDBFilename=|DataDirectory|Data base.mdf;"
providerName="System.Data.SqlClient" />-->
<!-- Connection String for SQL Server 2000/2005-->
<add
name="SiteSqlServer"
connectionString="Server=YOURSQLSERVERIPHERE;Database=YOURDBNAMEHERE ;uid=YOURUSERIDHERE;pwd=YOURPASSWORDHERE;"
providerName="System.Data.SqlClient" />

</connectionStrings>

The second one is in the appSettings section as shown below. I did the same with this one, commented out the first one, and enabled the second one.


<appSettings>
<!-- Connection String for SQL Server 2005 Express - kept for backwards compatability - legacy modules
<add key="SiteSqlServer" value="Data Source=.\SQLExpress;Integrated Security=True;User Instance=True;AttachDBFilename=|DataDirectory|Data base.mdf;"/>-->
<!-- Connection String for SQL Server 2000/2005 - kept for backwards compatability - legacy modules-->

<add key="SiteSqlServer" value="Server=YOURSQLSERVERIPHERE;Database=YOURDBNAMEHERE ;uid=YOURUSERIDHERE;pwd=YOURPASSWORDHERE;"/>


3. Immediately below the connectionstring setting in the appSettings section, you'll need to change the "AutoUpgrade" value from true to false. This will stop the setup from attemting to upgrade your new db, which in turn causes a weird bug in dnn. Took me a while to figure that one out.
4. That's it as far as regards the web.config. Now upload all the contents of dotnetnuke (including the edited web.config file) to your site using ftp.
One thing to note, if you upload it to a subdirectory of your domain, e.g. mydomain.com/dotnetnuke, you'll need to turn that directory into virtual directory from the control panel. Go to 'Web directories settings' and add that folder.
5. Once upload is complete, navigate to your url and run the setup in 'Auto' mode, any other mode will fail. If you get something like 'Site is unavailable', then navigate directly to the setup page e.g. www.mydomain.com/Install/InstallWizard.aspx.

That's it, your dotnetnuke should install without any problem and you can start editing your portal instantly.



As a follow up to my problem (the first post). I created a trouble ticket explaining my issue with dnn to the tech support at ix and they explained that I must install my dnn in the root of my domain. I did this and I"m still getting the same erro 'Directory Listing Denied'. As of writing this, I'm still waiting for them to explain to me how to get multiple portals to work.
Should they explain that it's not possible, then they should immediately take down any ads they have saying that they support dotnetnuke because in truth, if they don't support multiple portals, then they actually don't support it.

[kamau]

Well, after some trial and error and NO help from IX tech staff, I've finally got multiple portals to work!
All the documentation I've read online suggests that if you want a url e.g. www.xyz.com to point to a portal in dotnetnuke, all you do is create a portal and give it the alias of the url you want. Then from you domain (i.e. www.xyz.com), point it to the ip address of your dotnetnuke installation.
Since ixwebhosting doesnt' allow you to change your ip, this meant that I had to change my DNS A records. I changed them to point to my dotnetnuke installation and it's worked. It may take some time for it to work as expected, (mine took around 1 day), but now it's working fine.