trying to get some pre-sales info

[TheBear]

Hi,

I am posting here in hopes to get some pre-sales answers. I have tried calling the phone number on the site for sales off and on for about 2 months now and it is always busy. And the live chat is never on. Here is the email I sent almost 4 hours ago (please don't get on me for wanting a reply quickly, the website does say most are answered within 45 minutes).

I did ask for ap phone call back as I did not expect to be at a computer for the rest of today. No phone call either

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I am interested in your DirectAdmin product, and have questions, however the live chat is never on and I get constant busy signals when I try to call. Sorry for the rush, butI just got this new co-loc deal today and need to get my servers setup this weekend to shut down another leased machine by next Thursday (yes, my ttl's are already set to 30 min.)

I have to leave the office now and will not be near email again until late tonight or tomorrow which is why a phone call would be best.

I am configuring (for a planned move) some servers this weekend so need to ask some simple (not very technical) questions. The machine this is replacing currently runs FreeBSD, but I am moving back to Redhat (or fedora if you now support that).

One key question is I have a server I am building that will have 8 IP addresses and will house my normal mail server (not one supported by directadmin) and my ad server.

What I would like to do is use DirectAdmin on this box with the normal complement of software you include/support but also, on a couple of dedicated IPs run my normal mail server (I have reasons why I need to continue to run this mail server) and ad server.

The machine is a dual processor PIII, with scsi drives and over 1 gig of ram so performance is not an issue. I also get 1500 gb xfer per month on this account.

I also need to maintain DNS for my other domains which run on a different server. Can I use the same DNS that direct admin configures for these other domains? I already have a primary and secondary DNS (primary is typically run on this box).

Another thing is your pricing is very confusing to me. I need clarification on that.
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Regards

 

[nobaloney]

I am posting here in hopes to get some pre-sales answers. I have tried calling the phone number on the site for sales off and on for about 2 months now and it is always busy. And the live chat is never on. Here is the email I sent almost 4 hours ago (please don't get on me for wanting a reply quickly, the website does say most are answered within 45 minutes).

The DA staff is relatively small, and almost always overworked as we keep asking them for new features and they keep trying to add them for us .

Though I'm not connected with DA I'll try my best to answer your questions.

(Disclaimer: I have asked DA to authorize me as a reseller as they begin to authorize resellers, so I may soon be able to resell DA, but I'm not affiliated with them in any way now; just a satisfied user who gives back to the community as I can.)

I did ask for ap phone call back as I did not expect to be at a computer for the rest of today. No phone call either

DA staff, as I recall, has almost completely given up on the telephone as it has resulted in them never being able to get anything done at all.

One of the reasons they've decided to set up resellers is to take things such as pre-sales support calls and offload them to resellers, and though I'm not a reseller yet, I'll try my best to help you.

--- begin ---
I am interested in your DirectAdmin product, and have questions, however the live chat is never on and I get constant busy signals when I try to call. Sorry for the rush, butI just got this new co-loc deal today and need to get my servers setup this weekend to shut down another leased machine by next Thursday (yes, my ttl's are already set to 30 min.)

I'd set them for 10 minutes if possible, but even then there's always the possibility that some ISPs (AOL especially comes to mind, though I've heard others do it as well) will ignore TTLs and just refresh on their own schedules .

I have to leave the office now and will not be near email again until late tonight or tomorrow which is why a phone call would be best.

I'd be happy to call you but you don't leave your phone number. My telephone number is in my sig (below) or you can email me with your phone number and I'll be happy to call you back anywhere in the world (I use VoIP telephony so my bills are quite low).

However I don't read this forum more than a few times a day; please email or telephone for best results .

I am configuring (for a planned move) some servers this weekend so need to ask some simple (not very technical) questions. The machine this is replacing currently runs FreeBSD, but I am moving back to Redhat (or fedora if you now support that).

Fedora is supported. So is FreeBSD and RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux).

One key question is I have a server I am building that will have 8 IP addresses and will house my normal mail server (not one supported by directadmin) and my ad server.

What I would like to do is use DirectAdmin on this box with the normal complement of software you include/support but also, on a couple of dedicated IPs run my normal mail server (I have reasons why I need to continue to run this mail server) and ad server.

There shouldn't be a problem with your ad server. Your mail server may create a problem; it will definitely require manual changes to both your mail server's configuration system and to the exim.conf file used by DA so that the servers will only listen on port 25 on their respective IP#s.

I can't tell you how to do that on your mailserver as you haven't identified it, but for exim you should be able to find the information you need at http://www.exim.org/exim-html-4.30/doc/html/spec_13.html.

The major difficulty I forsee is that exim will want to write a sendmail interface, and that you may already have a sendmail interface to your current mailserver. Some hand tweaking after installation will probably be required.

The machine is a dual processor PIII, with scsi drives and over 1 gig of ram so performance is not an issue. I also get 1500 gb xfer per month on this account.

I don't forsee any problems, but of course without knowing all the specific details, neither can I guarantee there won't be any.

I also need to maintain DNS for my other domains which run on a different server. Can I use the same DNS that direct admin configures for these other domains?

Yes; you can add zones manually. DA's interface may not offer all the record types you'll need in your zones, but DA's interface will coexist with any manual DNS zone tweaking you do.

I already have a primary and secondary DNS (primary is typically run on this box).

No problem. Just tell DA the IP#s of your master DNS server (the box you're running DA on) and your slave DNS server (the "foreign" server).

You'll need to have a way to tell the slave server which domains it needs to slave; there's nothing built into DA which will automatially update the slave server's named.conf file.

Another thing is your pricing is very confusing to me. I need clarification on that.

Ask specific questions for me or someone else to answer.

Again, remember I don't answer this forum as often as I do email and telephone. Of course there may be others watching here who can help you as well.

Jeff