Question

Figure out which droplet is being used

Posted October 30, 2016 1.7k views
Ubuntu DNS

Hi all,

I’ve been working with a developer on reinstating a backup of my website. I have five droplets spinning. I know this is a total newbie question, but how do I figure out which droplet is pointing to my www.mywebsite.com?

I tried googling my website’s IP address using the following site to figure it out, but none of the ip addresses matched what was returned from site24x7.com/find-ip-address-of-web-site.html.

Any direction to understand what droplet is being used to house my current website would be appreciated. Thank you!

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sengerson
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6 answers
sengerson November 6, 2016

Okay, I talked to my developer and this is what he said. Floating IPs!

Response: The IP is different because it’s using a Floating IP. Floating IP’s are flexible IP addresses that can be instantly swapped to other droplets.

So when the site goes down, you sometimes have to boot up a new droplet and point the domain to another droplet. The DNS takes several hours to propagate, and during that time your site is completely inaccessible. Floating IP’s mitigate that because you can switch to a different machine, and the IP that normal traffic uses to get to your site doesn’t change, so no downtime! It’s like those switches on railroad tracks that change the trains from track to track without everything blowing up.

They are free to use, and extremely nice to have. Next time you move to a new droplet, you can spend as much time as needed setting the new one up, and switch whenever you want without the site going down :)

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xMudrii October 30, 2016

Basic ping command will return I address of your website. No need for Google or any other service.

If you are using Windows, open Command Prompt. In case of Linux/OS X you would need to find Terminal.

Execute:

  • ping example.com

Where example.com is your website address and you will see IP address.

Now when you have IP you need access to DigitalOcean Control Panel. Login to it and you should see list of Droplets with IP addresses. Droplet which IP address matches pinged one is Droplet that hosts your site.

I don’t understand which information you need exactly. IP address of website/Droplet is possible to get via ping because it’s public, but for every other info you basically need access to DigitalOcean account with that Droplet.

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sengerson October 30, 2016

None of them match the response back from your directions, and I know that it is one of the droplets. :(

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sengerson October 30, 2016

The reason why I’m asking is because my developer spun up a bunch of droplets to try to recover my site. Now I’m trying to figure out which one is the one that is hosting my site. Does that make sense?

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xMudrii October 30, 2016

This could be due to ping disabled for example.

You can verify DNS settings to get IP of right one.
If you are using DigitalOcean DNS management, login into Control Panel, go to Networking and select your domain from list (click on it). It should have A record that contains IP address of your Droplet.
If you are not using this, login to domain management of your domain register and see can you find A record.

Basically in very last resort you can stop apache/nginx on Droplet or power down Droplet one by one until you find which one hosts your site

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sengerson October 30, 2016

I have to A Record Types - One says @ and the other says old.
I also have a cname that matches my website address.

One of them (@) matches the IP that I got from my terminal ping, but isn’t listed in my droplet list.
The other (old) matches one of my droplets listed, but doesn’t match my ping.

Thoughts?

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  • xMudrii October 30, 2016

    A record that says @ should point at IP address of Droplet that hosts your website.
    Old could be some try to create sub domain, e.g. old.example.com or record pointing to old Droplet.

    Anyways @ should be relevant to you question

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    • sengerson October 30, 2016

      So how do I know which droplet it is if its not listed in my droplet listing?

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      • xMudrii October 31, 2016

        Are you sure developer didn’t transfered Droplet to his account?
        That A record means that when you type your domain in browser it will point to server with that IP.

        You should contact developer and check it with him.

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