OSE Staging Server
The OSE Staging Server (osestaging1) is an lxc container that lives on the OSE Development Server (osedev1). It is a severely under provisioned clone of our production server that is intentionally inaccessible to the Internet.
Access
To access the staging server, one must connect to the developer VPN.
If you an OSE developer that requires access to the staging server, please see VPN#Developers:_How_to_request_access_to_the_dev_VPN for instructions on how to request VPN access from the OSE System Administrator.
Tips
Identifying Staging vs Production
The /root/bin/syncToStaging.sh script that lives on the OSE_Server Production server and is responsible for syncing production state to the staging server modifies the docroots of the apache vhosts by dropping a single file is_staging into the root of the docroot for all the vhosts in /var/www/html/ with the contents true.
Therefore, if you want to validate if the website you're viewing in your browser (ie: www.opensourceecology.org) is coming from the production or staging server, you can query '/is_staging' (ie: https://www.opensourceecology.org/is_staging). Production will return a 404, and staging will return a 200.
Clearing DNS in firefox
After connecting to the VPN, your browser may still be caching the IP Address for the production server, so new requests for sites on the staging server (ie: www.opensourceecology.org) may still be communicating with production even after successfully connecting to the VPN and (automatically) updating your resolv.conf to resolve DNS records to the dev server.
You can clear your DNS cache in firefox by setting both network.dnsCacheExpirationGracePeriod and network.dnsCacheExpiration to 0 (default is 60) in about:config