CORE-13684 Beware server sync

[Si]

With the upcoming charges for cPanel for individual hosting accounts I used the server sync tool to identify hosting accounts on my server which had no paying customers.  After running the sync, I was amazed at how many there were.   (Wondered why they weren't terminated and deleted by WHMCS automatically over the years).  Anyway,  so I checked about 20 of them manually (all the white banded ones)......and for all of them, they were correct.  So with about 60 to get rid off, I was satisfied (foolishly) that the sync tool was correct.  I then manually deleted the accounts in WHM > Terminate Accounts.

Today I had a couple of customers contact me to tell me their website had disappeared and their email wasn't working.  Sure enough the paid for hosting accounts were gone.  

I had to recreate them on the server, and running the sync tool again, the same sites appeared as 'not linked to any WHMCS account again'.  But they are.  Paying customers with accounts that use the cPanel auto-login to the server etc etc.

It now seems that the only explanation I have is that the customer ordered the hosting account using a capital letter in the domain.  So the sync tool MUST be searching for the domain with all lower case and not allowing for (as WHMCS allows) the listing of capital letters in the client account.  So beware.

Obviously, if my conclusion is correct, this is something WHMCS would need to address.  If it's not, then something else is going on which is more worrying.  

[zomex]

Wow that's a big find. I hope you were able to restore the accounts.

Thanks for the heads up.

[Si]

Its pretty remedial stuff to be honest and would have thought someone would have picked this up during beta.  That said, caps and lower case in a search through a server ?  Should not be an issue at this level of software.

[WHMCS Edward]

Firstly sorry to hear about what happened here but glad to hear you were able to restore the accounts.

I think it's unusual for domain names within WHMCS to contain a mix of lower and uppercase but nonetheless ideally the tool should be able to handle that.  I have opened CORE-13684 to have this investigated.

-Ed

[crazeegeek]

Thanks for sharing this.

While i haven't upgraded from 7.7 yet, I just wanted to add that I have ran into issues over the years when using the older cPanel/WHM Import tool. I traced those issues to entries in the database for domains and usernames, that had blank space(s) at the beginning or end. I assumed these spaces were caused by staff edits/updates.

This may not be an issue with the new sync tool, but it is something you might want to check for.

 

 

[WHMCS John]

Hi there,

This has been improved in 7.8.2. Thanks for your feedback!