Services Are Down (BIND DNS, Postfix Mail, MySQL). Need Urgent Help please...

You could try updating them packages you have 40 lol there Also run the re-check

I'd also suggest to first take a look at the package manager (whichever comes with CentOS). For one, to perform the updates, and then, to check for broken dependencies or broken packages. Also try manually starting the BIND and MySQL services in SSH.

Vmin complaining about a missing Postfix and unable to start BIND and MySQL sounds like something is rather seriously broken there... What exactly can have happened that caused this? Some system crash or forced reboot or something?

Do you have backups available (of the system or websites)? It's possible that you need to reinstall the system and restore a backup, especially if you're a "Linux noob" and don't really know how to fix stuff. :)

Well, that's surely a pity... But I must say that creating regular backups is one of the first and foremost "must"s for a server administrator (especially since Virtualmin and Webmin have excellent backup features). Things can basically go awfully wrong at any time, as you've seen now...

(Aside from this, I'd quite probably ditch that "hoster" you're using... If they're unable to move your virtual machine to another host without breaking most of your installed services, however they managed to do that, and don't even hold backups of those for you... Not really the service I'd be using. :) )

To save the databases now, it might help to copy away the /var/lib/mysql directory, where MySQL should - at least it does so in Ubuntu - store all its databases. You might be able to copy those files back after the reinstall.

Same goes for the contents of /home, where all vserver files, users and mails should be stored.

And you might copy away /etc, which holds all config files. Warning! Do not simply copy back the contents of /etc after the reinstall, but only use the copy as reference, in case the new installation is missing things or settings.

As for "no idea how to do the things I told you": I'm sorry, but frankly I must say, if you don't know how to login to your server via SSH and restart a service (and also cannot use Google etc. to find out how to do that), I'm afraid I'll have to suggest you should reconsider if operating a Linux-based hosting server is the right thing for you... Virtualmin is a great help for web hosting, and eases mostly all processes involved in that, but it generally does not liberate you from the responsibility to still have at least a basic understanding of the underlying system.

Hehe, not very talkative there. You'll probably find more in /var/log/syslog as to why the startup failed.

Reinstalling the package sure can't hurt, as in it probably won't damage more than is already broken. ;) Unfortunately though I can't help you with operating the CentOS package manager, since I'm using Ubuntu (a Debian derivative) myself, which has a quite different one.

Yeah, you can use SFTP... Which is like an FTP client, but using the SSH protocol to transfer stuff. There's a text mode client "SFTP" which works much like the Linux FTP, albeit it's not very comfortable. Might use the Midnight Commander instead which can make sn SFTP connection using "Shell Link" in the Left/Right menu. Might have to install the package for that though, which is named mc in Ubuntu.

Did you also copy all subdirectories from /var/lib/mysql? Did you stop MySQL while copying the files, and restart it afterwards?

now if this method wont work, is there any other way to export a mysql database without mysql running?

Without MySQL running, you'd need to just copy the database files. That's a fast and reliable way of copying MySQL databases around.

Do you see the directory "/var/lib/mysql/db_test" on both servers?

And then in that directory should be the file "jos_banner.frm", does that exist on both servers?

Next, you'd want to verify that the permissions and ownership are the same in both cases. You can see the permissions and owners by running "ls -l /var/lib/mysql/db_test/jos_banner.frm".

-Eric

Ownership and permission is a good point, indeed. Although then the error message should have been "permission denied", and not "can't find file". :)

Next step, if the jos_banner.frm file does exist in the old and new database directory, would be to test accessing it directly from the MySQL command line client.

(If the file actually does not exist, it probably got corrupted/deleted during whatever damaged the rest of your server. At which point you'd again need that backup... :-( )

Execute this in SSH:

mysql -p{your-mysql-root-password}

Make sure there's no space between the -p and the password, and it's not your server root password, but the one you entered during the "Virtualmin post-install wizard" as your MySQL root password. Then execute:

show databases;
use db_test;
show tables;
select * from jos_banner limit 5;

If it works okay, that will show you all databases on the server, then all tables in the database "db_test", then the first 5 rows in the "jos_banner" table.

Yeah, both of those owner/permission sets on the old and new server look odd. Normally, the database subdirectories (except for "mysql" itself) are owned by mysql:{virtualserveradmingroup} and have permissions like those on your new server. If that differs, it can clearly be the reason. In your case, the MySQL process does not get access rights cause the directory is owned by root.

You should check under which user account the MySQL daemon is running, you can do that with ps aux | grep mysql and check for the line with the mysqld executable. The user (first column) listed there should be the owner of database directories/files.

Ownership can be changed with chown, permissions with chmod.

The "s" bit is called "setuid / setgid" (set user ID, set group ID). They cause that new files created inside the directory get the ownership of the directory, and not (as is normally the case) the ownership of the user creating the file.

btw, anyone know a good/cheap backup service i can use easily with virtualmin?

If you haven't already, you may want to take a look at Virtualmin's built-in backups. You can access them by going into Backup and Restore -> Scheduled Backups.

I'd suggest setting up a backup to run each day.

You can have it store the backup locally, or on a remote FTP or SSH server.

-Eric

Usually, worthwhile hosting companies offer FTP backup space for their customers. :)

I personally would not use a hoster which does not offer that. Hence I haven't really checked yet on the net for alternative backup space, can't say much.

I do three levels of backup on my virtual machine host. 1) VMs store images of system and user data on another dedicated backup storage VM (on the same host). 2) From there, backups are auto-copied to the hoster's backup store. 3) From time to time, I initiate an offsite backup (= copying the images) to a machine at University where I work :).