Hi,
I recently decided to move my clients' hosted websites to a VPS to get them off of the ancient thing in my server room (I built it in about 2002). I spent a couple of days moving stuff from my own custom setup into what ISPManager calls "WWW Domains" and got everything working again. Swapped DNS and we're off... But... While poking through my old email, I discovered that I had at one time purchased a 50 domain license for Virtualmin.
My question: Is there anything close to automated that would allow me to do an in-place install of Virtualmin on the new server or will I have to start from scratch again? I just renewed my Virtualmin license as an impulse and am now realizing that I really don't want to do that much work again. ISPManager is not bad, but I always kind of liked Webmin.
Any ideas?
it is possible to install virtualmin on a system with domains, but I dont believe it's a very easy process to bring all of your stuff under control of virtualmin.
Once done however I think it will make your system admin life a lot easier
I'm concerned with the likelihood of downtime as I make the attempt. One of my clients is launching a new site this weekend and I can't really take them down for hours while I fiddle with this. I was hoping there was a magic commandline switch. :)
I'm sure I can get it all moved, I'm just trying to decide if it's worth the effort. I mean, I can install webmin for the server admin side of things and live with ISPManager for the hosting thing. I just didn't want to.
Thanks, Ronald, for your reply.
Virtualmin does have an Import Virtual Server feature, which looks at the existing virtual hosts in Apache, and makes them into Virtualmin accounts. It is somewhat flexible and somewhat configurable, so might be able to pull in those domains without too much trouble and without getting too many things wrong. Because there are practically infinite ways to setup virtual hosts, and their related users/groups/services, on a Linux system, it's hard to say how well it'll work until you try it, or at least until you look at the way ISPManager does things and compare it to the way Virtualmin does things. If ISPManager does things roughly similar to the way Virtualmin does things (which is a pretty common way to set things up; we didn't invent the ways we configure virtual hosts, we merely put a friendly UI on industry standard best practices), then it should mostly Just Work(tm).
That said, you almost certainly cannot safely install Virtualmin using the automated install script on a system that is already in service. It will almost definitely take you offline to try to do so, and it would be impossible for me to guesstimate how long it might take to fix what gets broken. But, given that it's extremely time-consuming and tedious to install and configure everything manually, it's probably a toss-up as to whether you'd be better off installing Virtualmin manually and probably not breaking anything (assuming you know what you're doing), or running the install script and almost certainly breaking at least mail and probably web service for some period of time while you fix the incompatibilities in the way we do things and the way your old control panel did things. In either case, knowing what you're doing (in the sense of knowing what logs to look into for the source of trouble and how to read them and act on what errors you see there) is pretty much mandatory.
Virtualmin is really easy to install and use, if you start from a fresh OS and run our automated install script. But when you step off that well-paved path, you're definitely leaving behind the "easy".
We're happy to help out with any questions you have along the way, of course.
What you might want to do is spin up a test environment in a virtual machine, and test out the different methods of getting things spinning. If it turns out you can run the Virtualmin install script without causing any serious breakage, you'd be looking at an easy afternoon of work to fully migrate. I don't know what the odds are of that happening, though, since I've never seen ISPManager or read anything about how it does things.
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