Restore turning symlinks into files

Submitted by simon.browning on Tue, 07/08/2014 - 10:53

I've posted this in the forums at: https://www.virtualmin.com/node/33607, but have since licensed the server, so thought I'd try out the support system:

I've done this plenty of times and am not sure why I'm having an issue now

I'm moving a site from one server to another. Both servers are running centos 6.5. The 'old" server is running virtualmin 4.07, the new server 4.08.

I use the old server and create the backup file.

On the new server I use the restore to create the site there.

For some reason the symlinks in the backup are being turned into files during the restore, causing the restore to fail with :

Extracting TAR file of home directory .. .. TAR failed!

/bin/tar: ./public_html/Web: Cannot create symlink to `my-src-folder-here': File exists /bin/tar: Exiting with failure status due to previous errors

The backup file correctly has the symlink. I've verified by manually extracting it.

I can manually complete this transfer, but ideally would like to get to the bottom of it in case we run into it again. Any ideas?

Thank you

Simon

Status: 
Closed (fixed)

Comments

Submitted by andreychek on Tue, 07/08/2014 - 11:00

Thanks -- I did receive your backup file, and have been doing some testing on it.

I reached a point where I need Jamie's assistance.

Jamie is on vacation at the moment, whenever he gets back I was going to pick his brain about what might be going on there.

Submitted by simon.browning on Tue, 07/08/2014 - 11:08

Ok cool, thanks.

I'll do a manual xfer for now, and hopefully (or not) we can reproduce it again later.

Simon

Submitted by andreychek on Tue, 07/08/2014 - 11:12

Oh I meant to say I can reproduce the problem when performing the restore using Virtualmin. But not when unpacking it manually, from the command line.

And that's where I need Jamie's assistance, something in the way Virtualmin is unpacking that archive seems to be triggering the issue you're seeing.

Submitted by JamieCameron on Tue, 07/08/2014 - 12:47

I'm back now actually - Eric, was this issue specific to this particular backup, or for any backups using symlinks?

Submitted by JamieCameron on Wed, 07/09/2014 - 19:31

So the underlying issue here is that the public HTML directory for this domain was set to a path that is a symlink, which breaks Virtualmin when restoring. We should really prevent this - I will fix that in the next release.

Until then, the work-around is as follows :

  1. Do a restore of the domain, which will fail
  2. Delete public_html/Web under the domain's home dir
  3. Try the restore again

Submitted by simon.browning on Wed, 07/09/2014 - 21:10

Thanks very much.

I'm not 100% certain, but pretty sure I was able to do this in the past. I did a restore of the same site to a development server about 2 months ago.

We're good for now though, thanks for looking at it.

Simon

Submitted by Issues on Wed, 07/23/2014 - 23:21

Automatically closed -- issue fixed for 2 weeks with no activity.