Web Reactor Networks

WebReactor Networks

Before you can begin to use the services provided by WebReactor Networks you must create a user account on their web site.

Open the http://www.webreactor.net website and select the option to create your own account. Finish the process and study the WebReactor Networks documentation on how to setup your account, password, hosts and the URL-string you should use in Simple Failover. You can find the information in the Support / Getting Started / Step 4 Activate your domain section.

Click on the Activate / Update section under the Members, DNS Options menu and enter the IP address to the web-service you want to monitor and dynamically update.

When you click on the Manual button on the web page, then WebReactor performs the initial setup of your IP address. A web page with the result is displayed. In the browsers URL-field is the string you need to perform the updates via Simple Failover. Write down the URL-string. The string is used later in this example.

Continue the configuration in Simple Failover.
Create a new Server Set by clicking on the New Server Set icon on the Toolbar.

To identify the Name Server you are going to update from Simple Failover, first execute the command nslookup -type=NS webreactor.net from a command prompt:

Remember: Only resolve the parent domain name i.e. webreactor.net. You should not resolve child domain names e.g. the web-server name or the FTP server name.

Select the "primary" Domain Name Server. In this example it is ns1.webreactor.net with the IP address 63.195.55.114.

Select the Update DNS tab, and check-mark the field: Update DNS (off=monitoring only). Click the Add… button to enter the DNS server properties.

The following information has to be entered into the DNS Server Properties dialog:

Note: You are only able to see part of the Update URL string as displayed in this screen shot.
The DNS server is found by clicking the Look Up button and in the field write: ns1.webreactor.net as found earlier via the nslookup command and click OK. Simple Failover resolves the DNS server name into an IP address.

Enter the URL string in the Update URL field that you saved earlier.
The string is entered on one line with no line breaks. In this example the string we saved was: http://www.webreactor.net/index.cgi?content=activate&username=thule&passkey=tricky&action=activate&ip_address=$IP$&manual_ip=Manual

IMPORTANT: The IP address is normally entered in the string in the section ip_address=186.127.48.91 but it is now substituted with the string ip_address=$IP$& where the IP address is provided by Simple Failover through the variable $IP$. Simple Failover insert the correct IP address found on the Servers tab.

The string to enter in the Success text field is found by performing an update test from a browser and then look for a recognizable string. This is the resulting page from WebReactor Networks:

In this example the string you want to look for is Success:.

Add the string Success: to the Success text field.

The Server Sets tab might look like this after you have configured the Server Set.

In case of an update request performed by Simple Failover then WebReactor Networks returns a web page (in the background) with the result of an update request of the HTTP-based DNS database now pointing to the Web server at IP address 107.86.11.37.
The update is acknowlegded because Simple Failover found the string Success: in the response from WebReactor Networks.