account migration ?s (domains and mailman)

[bdominick]

Well, as JM says, the best way to do it is to make the .com in WHM and use your PCs hosts file to direct requests for that domain directly to the new server. That way you can test in a "live" environment. You can also test via http://IP/~cpanelusername/ but can have mixed results with that method based on how the software is coded.

Yeah, I'm not worried about testing HTTP so much -- I've been doing the above. The only shortcoming there is that most of the links are absolute, so every link on his site on my server just takes me to his current server, which means a lot of retyping base URLs to test. But I'm pretty confident in most of the HTTP stuff. Luckily I haven't had to test too many forms or anything.

If you want to do it the way you describe, where the .org is used for staging, then the .com is parked on that when it is "go time," there is no need for an email forwarder. When you park a domain it adds the ability for you to create real email accounts @primary-domain.com and @parked-domain.com

Ah, hence the drop-down menu in the email account setup that now only offers the .org domain. I've already set up the accounts, and I don't see a way to edit them in cPanel. Luckily, there are only a few, so I can redo those manually. Thanks for that insight -- big help.

Now if you want to go the hosts file route, and you are trying to email the REAL .com remove the domain from /etc/localdomains and put it in /etc/remotedomains and you may need to restart exim (forgot, but I believe so). That should send it to the remote .com

Then when the site is ready to go, reverse the process and stick the domain back in localdomains, and point the DNS over to the new box.

Okay, that's good to know for the future, but we're close enough now that I'm not going to sweat it for this operation. We can use my GMail if the client needs to reach me during the final hours.

The alternative is to suck it up and take a few minutes of potential downtime and unpark the .com so that the only configs on the server are for the .org

But I can do this while 3rd party DNS entries are not yet sending the world to our site -- right after I switch the nameservers at the registrar -- so it shouldn't effectively be "downtime" at all.

Then, go into WHM and use the modify account function and change the domain from .org to .com and that SHOULD take care of everything. Then go into the new .com cPanel and park the .org on the .com

I just do this via List Accounts > [Username] > Alter Account Settings ? I see that's editable -- for some reason I thought it was not, or I couldn't find it before. This is a relief. Again, thanks.

No need to respond to this message unless it sounds like I'm not getting something.