Changing sandcats hostname on an instance should be possible and documented.

[jdougan]

Originally in #3437 (comment) I said:

I'm running this on a dedicated "production" system and pushing to try to make it show the thrashing behavior makes me kind of nervous. What I want to do is take a system backup, restore it to a new Xen VM, then assign a different sandcats address to it. Is there any way to easily point a sandstorm installation to a new sandcats.io address?

And later the same issue came up when trying to work around a recalcitrant installer in #3624 (comment)

How can I reconfigure a sandstorm install with a different sandcats name without reinstalling it or starting it? Last time I tried backing up and restoring the whole vps, things got confused because both sandstorms were assuming that they had the name and shutting down the old instance wasn't an option at that time.

For that matter, once the instance is running, can the sandcats name be changed? Or even turn just turn off sandcats altogether before startup, then fix it up once it is running?

[ocdtrekkie]

This is probably a good feature request. I will state that you should be able to disable Sandcats effectively by removing the SANDCATS_BASE_DOMAIN line from your sandstorm.conf file before starting the Sandstorm service. That shouldn't remove any of Sandcats other configuration, so restoring it and restarting the service should then enable Sandcats.

[jdougan]

I will state that you should be able to disable Sandcats effectively by removing the SANDCATS_BASE_DOMAIN line from your sandstorm.conf file before starting the Sandstorm service. That shouldn't remove any of Sandcats other configuration, so restoring it and restarting the service should then enable Sandcats.

I'm just trying this out to see what happens right now. I want to run it on a bare IP, as it if a temporary test and I don't care if security is compromised in this case. It invalidated the existing login provider (github) and I had to change BASE_URL to the IP based URL. That let me set up github auth again, but I couldn't open up grains, it just spins the wait image. I suspect it is a wildcard_host issue, though I have no idea how to verify it.

[zenhack]

Quoting John Dougan (2022-05-31 21:15:20)

(github) and I had to change BASE_URL to the IP based URL. That let me set up github auth again, but I couldn't open up grains, it just spins the wait image. I suspect it is a wildcard_host issue, though I have no idea how to verify it.

Yeah, Sandstorm runs each grain on a subdomain, so you really need a domain name, not an IP for this to work.