DirectAdmin 1.699

[zEitEr]

We are happy to announce the release of DirectAdmin 1.699.

Probably it happened in one of the previous releases (in or before 1.697), can not say for sure. But noticed only now. The admin's password in LiteSpeed gets changed with every build/upgrade. It is no longer preserved. I wonder is it a bug or a desired feature? Can we have the password preserved and survive updates please.

 

[Joriz]

We just upgraded from 1.697 to 1.699 and noticed that suddenly the DNS endpoint has changed. Due to this many API calls but also (bookmarked) links dont work anymore. The old url also gives a 404 and not a user friendly redirect.

old url: /evo/user/dns/
new url: /evo/user/dns-records

I looked in to the changelog and API documentation but can't find anything about this change.
@fln is this an intended change?

 

[fln]

@zEitEr, the source of truth for the LS and OLS web UI credentials is the /usr/local/directadmin/conf/setup.txt file. If this file contains litespeedadmin=... line, it will use it as a password. When setup.txt does not have litespeedadmin entry a new random password is generated and stored in this file. Usually creating a new password happens only on the initial install. Reinstalling it again reuses the same password from the setup.txt file.

Unless file setup.txt gets removed completely or litespeedadmin line is removed, the admin UI password should be stable. You can also use different static password by writing it into the setup.txt file and rebuilding LS/OLS.

 

[fln]

@Joriz, the Evolution page URLs are not part of the API. They are just names to load different parts of Evolution skin. The URLs used to retrieve the data from backend are stable (they never change or we inform everyone about changes). We consider Evolution routes (URLs for different pages) to be part of Evolution skin internals. As long as you use the Evolution menu or search for navigation the URL changes should not cause any problems.

Even if there are menu customizations (for example existing menu items are hidden or have custom icon) the URL changes will not break the existing customizations.

However, you are right about Evolution URL changes breaking bookmarks stored on the client devices. We are aware of this side-effect and we try to only change the URLs when we really need to (usually to allow us to have better overall structure of the Evolution components). The server administrators can not do anything about bookmarks stored in the browsers of end users. When users see the broken bookmark they should update just update it or remove it.

Note, we are planning a bigger change for the Evolution URL structure in the upcoming DA releases. The plan is to make URLs shorter by removing the access level component from the URL. In the near future the /evo/user/dns-records will get changed to /evo/dns-records. This would affect most of the URLs.

 

[zEitEr]

If this file contains litespeedadmin=... line, it will use it as a password.

Thanks. What if we use a custom username to connect to LiteSpeed admin dashboard. What variable should we use for the username in this case?

 

[fln]

At the moment CustomBuild always uses hard-coded name admin. That is why password field uses name litespeedadmin. With auto generated passwords using a fixed username is not a security concern. I suppose using custom username could be desirable if a manual password is used.