Changing Hostname? Who's done it?

[Brian DArcy]

Hello all!

We are on the enterprise edition, and went with the provided 3cx hostname for our initial deployment because we were in the process of an organization name change (new domains etc..). Now that the dust has settled from that, I wanted to go ahead and utilize our own domain for our 3CX installation. From what I've already read online, this is a fairly straight forward process, but requires me to 1) backup the 3cx installation (uncheck license/fqdn), 2) release the domain from our license key in the customer portal, and 3) re-install 3cx, and restore from backup.

Sounds easy enough, but I was hoping to get some feedback on gotchya's, headaches, or "wish I'd done this first.." if any, from those who have done this previously.

Thanks!

 

[Saqqara]

Couple of things to add.

You will have to supply your own SSL certificate - https://www.3cx.com/docs/fqdn-ssl-certificate-v15/ and renew it when it expires.

If you are provisioning clients using FQDN instead of IP , these may need reprovisioning.

You will have to ask yourself, it is worth the hassle - does it really matter what fqdn 3CX uses.

 

[Brian DArcy]

Thanks! Yep, I knew about the SSL part, just omitted it in my post. And you're right, for the most part, the FQDN doesn't matter a great deal, but we use the conferencing feature quite heavily, and for appearances sake, it would be nice to have our domain listed in these outgoing e-mails. Just part of the re-branding process.

 

[Saqqara]

If you are talking about webmeetings, these are hosted by 3CX and will always use 3CX fqdn

 

[YiannisH_3CX]

Hello @Brian DArcy

As @Saqqara mentioned the webmeeting FQDN will always be a 3CX FQDN. We will take the provided FQDN and contract a .net FQDN for webmeeting based on the following guide:
https://www.3cx.com/docs/fqdn-management-allocation/
If you still want to use your own FQDN however the procedure is the one you mentioned and it is pretty straight forward.

 

[VoIP-Ninja]

You will have to ask yourself, it is worth the hassle - does it really matter what fqdn 3CX uses.

yes, it does matters. With your own FQDN you can set your own DNS TTL, which means in case of failover or migration to new server / instance you'll be back up faster. 3cx fqdn default TTL is afaik 6h - which is much too long.

 

[Saqqara]

yes, it does matters. With your own FQDN you can set your own DNS TTL, which means in case of failover or migration to new server / instance you'll be back up faster. 3cx fqdn default TTL is afaik 6h - which is much too long.

The user is running enterprise so the TTL is set to 5 mins.

 

[Brian DArcy]

The user is running enterprise so the TTL is set to 5 mins.

I've never seen this mentioned, and is good to know! Is there a definitive list somewhere of small interesting tidbits such as this with a version breakdown?

 

[Brian DArcy]

If you are talking about webmeetings, these are hosted by 3CX and will always use 3CX fqdn

Hello @Brian DArcy

As @Saqqara mentioned the webmeeting FQDN will always be a 3CX FQDN. We will take the provided FQDN and contract a .net FQDN for webmeeting based on the following guide:
https://www.3cx.com/docs/fqdn-management-allocation/
If you still want to use your own FQDN however the procedure is the one you mentioned and it is pretty straight forward.

Thanks all, I was unaware. Since 99% of our phones are internal, it would seem a bit pointless, since the external fqdn would never really be seen.

 

[cobaltit]

I've never seen this mentioned, and is good to know! Is there a definitive list somewhere of small interesting tidbits such as this with a version breakdown?

This particular tidbit is listed on the page here: https://www.3cx.com/docs/fqdn-management-allocation/

DNS TTL
When you use a 3CX FQDN, the DNS TTL (time to live) depends on the 3CX License used. Standard and Professional licenses have a TTL of 6 hours. Enterprise Editions however, set the TTL to 300 seconds. This allows for immediate failover which will update the 3CX FQDN to the IP of the new server in less than 5 minutes. The shorter the TTL, the quicker the FQDN Mapping to IP updates.

 

[YiannisH_3CX]

This particular tidbit is listed on the page here: https://www.3cx.com/docs/fqdn-management-allocation/

Also mentioned in the failover guide: https://www.3cx.com/docs/failover/