I have a new installation set up on a remotely hosted server. It has the same URL as the system it replaces, so I can't get to it until the DNS changes are put through. However, I need to work on the instance to get it ready. How can I access this brand new install to update it. It's a LAMP set up on my ISP.

I have CPanel, but I don't have any command line access, just the ability to change the core files. I don't have Apache access.

Thanks for the help and I apologise if there is already an answer - I couldn't find it

Comments

chrispeat’s picture

Your ISP / Hositng provider should be able to give you access to the space by means other than the domain name. It is hard for anyone else to speculate the exact method of finding out this information but I think they would be able to advise no problems.

Chris - (trying - desperately - to earn qudos points for someone to look at my posts)

glassbyd’s picture

Thanks - I am trying that route as well, but their normal reply is (as you might expect) we don't offer support for Drupal

Jon

chrispeat’s picture

Apart from clean URLs being an issue through .htaccess I wouldnt see why it wouldnt work. If they are simply saying that they do not support drupal specifically then that is fine - they are not supporting it, they are just providing hosting access on their LAMP platform. They should do that.

All you'd need to do is make sure your config files are set to your temp address and it should be all systems go.

Strange how hosts dont want to play ball....

Chris - (trying - desperately - to earn qudos points for someone to look at my posts)

Mark B’s picture

We have to do this quite a lot - our company specialises in redeveloping existing websites, which in practice usually means moving them to Drupal ;-)

If you know the IP address of your new site, you can just add a local hosts record. In Windows, this is in C:\Windows\System32\Drivers\etc\hosts (you'll need to run Notepad as administrator on Vista/Windows7 to edit this), and on Linux this is in /etc/hosts

Add a new line to the file:

1.2.3.4 www.mynewsite.com

and as if by magic, browsing to www.mynewsite.com will take you to your new site. As a bonus, because you are accessing it using the proper host name, you can make sure it's picking up the right settings.php file.

glassbyd’s picture

I should have posted that this was how we solved the problem

pancho66’s picture

Looking in etc/ and the only file in there is ftpquota. Should I create a hosts file? Thanks.

EyakiGlee’s picture

The solution of setting a local DNS entry will work if you are the only person who needs to access the website. However, if others need to access the website, then you might setup a temporary subdomain name for the site.

I assume that you can't access the site by IP address because the site is using name-based hosting, and has several websites mapped to the same IP address. This is typical with hosting providers.

The easiest way to solve this problem is to create a temporary subdomain for your new website. For example, if your primary domain name is www.domain.com, then you can set this site to be dev.domain.com. This is easy to do. Here are the steps:

1. Use cpanel to temporarily change your website's domain name from domain.com to dev.domain.com.

2. Access you registrar or DNS nameserver and create an A record that points dev.domain.com to the IP address of your new site. If you are using cpanel and your host provides DNS, select the DNS/nameservers link to set this up.

3. Wait until DNS updates, and then access your site using your subdomain.

Good luck!

glassbyd’s picture

Even more thanks