Keeping servers the way you set them

What Kontrol7 does when a setting is changed by hand, a server restarts, a server is rebuilt, or the panel cannot be reached.

Kontrol7 keeps every server the way you set it in the panel. The agent on each server checks it again and again, whether or not anything changed.

Every change is checked before it goes live

A new setting is prepared beside the one in use, checked, and only then put in its place, with the previous version kept. A web server change that would not start is refused before it can take every site on the server down, and the last working setting stays in use. If one website's settings are refused, that website is held back on its own and reported once, and every other website's changes still go through.

What this gives you

A setting changed by hand is put back. Someone edits a file on a server during an incident. The next check restores it, and it shows up in your notifications rather than being discovered months later.

A server that restarts recovers. Its websites and virtual machines are started again by themselves. A virtual machine its owner switched off stays off. There is no half-made change to unpick, because a change is put in place whole or not at all.

A server rebuilt from bare metal is set up again by the same path. Reinstall the machine, add it again, and its jobs and settings are put back like any other change.

If the panel cannot be reached

Your servers keep working. Websites, mail and DNS keep serving, because each server holds what it needs to run them.

Each server also keeps up its own routine work while the panel is away:

Websites that stop, including after a server restart, are started again, and so are their applications.
Scheduled backups run on time, and old ones are tidied away as usual, as long as the backup server can be reached.
Nameservers renew the signatures on DNSSEC-signed domains before they run out, so those domains keep resolving.
After two days without the panel, a server renews its own website and mail certificates that are close to running out.

What waits for the panel:

Changes you or your customers make, and adding servers.
Certificates for wildcard names, and others that can only be proven through DNS. They are not renewed until the panel is back, and keep the time they had left.
Virtual machines stopped by a server restart. They start again once the panel is back.

When the panel is back, each server reconnects by itself, even after weeks away, and Activity says once what it did in the meantime.

All of this is built and tested. It has not yet been run through a real outage of the panel on a live server.