Hi, occassionally a strange virtual server gets created with a bunch of numbers (apparantly created by root).. but i didn't create it.. It is as described as per the following link.
http://www.virtualmin.com/node/19310
This bug still exists a couple of years on and has happened twice in the last 3 weeks for me.
The account appears to be created at midnight at the same time as an incremental backup. Further to it creates havoc because:
IF ghost account exists AND an incremental backup occurs: 1. Files ".tar.gz", ".tar.gz.info", ".tar.gz.dom" get created (the filenames are exactly as listed).. the ".tar.gz" file grows in size incrementally such that it expands to use up the entire hard drive!
a normal incremental backup is 2MB.. In this case day 1, file size is 2GB, day 2 the next backup is 4GB .. and so on until the hard drive is full..
This is detrimental as the logs don't show anything out of the usual until the hard drive is full
I believe the the backup processes should be able to identify if it is trying to backup an unnamed virtual server .. it should be able to detect if it is going to create a file named ".tar.gz" and know to not back this up and also log and email warn that something has gone wrong when detected !
I have deleted the rogue server and the backup works normally, but this problem where the hard drive fills up trying to backup a blank server does not need to occur and is preventable.
Comments
Submitted by andreychek on Thu, 06/20/2013 - 09:03 Comment #1
Howdy -- thanks for the bug report.
That issue with the numerical Virtual Server has proven difficult to reproduce, though we've received some reports recently suggesting it shows up around the same time as the backups are running... that'll help Jamie look into that.
The issue with it filling up the disk is troubling though! Do you happen to know what it's backing up in those cases?
That is, if you run the command "tar tzvf FILENAME.tar.gz", it'll show the filenames and directories of what's in the tar archive (without actually extracting them). If you happen to have one of those files there at the moment, we'd love to know what output the above command produces.
Submitted by JamieCameron on Thu, 06/20/2013 - 14:12 Comment #2
I had a look at this, and if an incomplete domain exists the backup might include the whole filesystem!
I will fix this in the next Virtualmin release (4.02)
Submitted by Ishvara on Sun, 06/23/2013 - 02:10 Comment #3
Thanks a lot for looking into this. :)
I think as Jamie indicated, it was backing up the entire filesystem. In my case I store the incremental backups locally and then run a script to rsync those files elsewhere..
I think when this bug occurs it was capturing everything including the previous backups.. Which caused it to fill up the hard drive space within a few days. Each subsequent incremental backup then ended up backing up the previous backups..causing it to be incrementally bigger.
The name of the partial virtual server gets backed up exactly as ".tar.gz" with no filename at the front.
Submitted by Locutus on Sun, 08/11/2013 - 15:45 Comment #4
I think I have another pointer about this.
I just found one of those number-only domains on my experimental VM. Contents of its domain file:
So it was created August 10th 14:22. I checked Webmin's miniserv.log, and this was done at the relevant time:
If I recall correctly, what I did was take a backup of ONLY the Virtualmin configuration (to transfer it to a new test Virtualmin). I.e. I turned off all domains, selected all VM features, and chose "download in browser" and "single archive file".
Submitted by JamieCameron on Sun, 08/11/2013 - 19:30 Comment #5
Locutus - thanks for pointing this out .. I found a bug that can caused an empty domain to be created in this case, if you chose to download the backup in your browser. Is that what happened in your case?
Submitted by Locutus on Mon, 08/12/2013 - 01:43 Comment #6
Yep that's right, I downloaded the config-only backup in my browser. Good to know we finally tackled this phantom ;)