I am about to upgrade a RHE 4 Dell 2850 server to Centos 5. The RHE 4 was/is running Virtualmin.
The RHE 4 system was recently corrupted by a "helpful" engineer who managed to recurse permissions/owner settings from the domain all the way up to root.
A company I use ("For Linux") here in the UK sorted out the worst of it so I have some website functionality and email, but a few things like php forms do not send emails through postfix now and similar quirks.
So a complete reinstall has been decided upon after what can only be described as the week from hell :-) (don't those weeks just seem to occur all to frequently in IT though...:-)? ) Just to clarify too the "helpful" engineer was not from the company For Linux who are always great, this guy was doing some voluntary work on a charity domain I host.
I have all the virtualmin domains / websites backed up to external usb drive using the virtualmin utility.
My question is this... Can I install Centos 05 to the Dell 2850 preserving the (Raid 1 hardware) partitions I created whilst running under RHE4. My hope / anticipation is that this will enable me to set the default permissions back to the OS and then reinstall Virtualmin.
If I completely reformat and remove the partitions is that likely to cause any restore problems when restoring the virtualmin domains that were backed up if the partitiion structure is different?
OR and preferably.... Once I have the physical server sorted out and running can I install Centos 05 onto a virtual machine (using vmware server) and use that as the main webserver, install virtualmin onto that and restore the domains to the virtual server which will of course give some resiliance to the whole setup in the future in the event of hardware failure or similar OS corruption.
Still claiming to be a Linux Newbieish I'm afraid after three years as Webmin and Virtualmin have made it so easy to manage the server that when I get real problems I am still stuck! So any replies might well need a kind of step by step if any commands need running!
Any help tips info etc would be most appreciated as I would like to try an get the job done this weekend if possible.
Paul
Update and a problem:
I decided to go for a new virtual server under vMware. (This had to be on a new physical machine Dell 2950 as the Dell 2850 hardware doesn't support 64 bit virtual machines under vmware)
The physical host has Centos 05 on it running without problem as far as I can tell. The Guest machine also has Centos 05 on it too ( 64bit again) Virtualmin Pro has been installed on the new Virtual Guest machine too apparently without problem again.
So with everything looking apparently good I switched off the old machine and restored the backed up Virtualmin backups of the websites using restore all features (they had been backed up with the same - all features, new format one file per domain)
The restore appears to go ok and all the relavent files appear there under the right folder etc.
But.... I cannot see any Joomla site or another custom site with a regular index.html home page. The holding page of another Joomla site appears in the browser when entering in another domains name. Something is clearly getting mixed up in the restore process.
Any ideas or suggestions most appreciated about where to even start looking for the problem. Luckily I still have the 2850 limping along but I need to get this resolved so any help /suggestions would be appreciated.
<div class='quote'>But.... I cannot see any Joomla site or another custom site with a regular index.html home page. The holding page of another Joomla site appears in the browser when entering in another domains name. Something is clearly getting mixed up in the restore process.</div>
This is probably mis-matches in the NameVirtualHost and VirtualHost entries. The restore, obviously, shouldn't have made mistakes with these...but that's what it sounds like.
Is there anything in the /var/log/httpd/error_log on restart of httpd? We'll probably need to see the NameVirtualHost directives and the beginning of one of the effected VirtualHost sections.
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Hi Joe,
Thanks for the reply. I have in fact been "playing" to find out what is wrong (one advantage of virtual servers is that it can make you very brave and bold on infinitely replaceable development machines :-) )
When I first built the virtual machine and installed the OS, I did so at home and connected it to the web by DHCP - compared to in the DC where the IP's are static.
I noticed on the new production machine that I had a number of different IP addresses listed in virtual min and an incorrect default IP for virtualmin to use as a shared IP.
I suspect that this is causing many of the issues. The virtual server main ethernet has an IP of xxx.xxx.xxx.90 the same IP as the "old" physical server which is/was closed down just prior to transfering everything.
This IP xx.90 didn't get picked up as a default IP by virtualmin when I changed it using the Centos GUI and it has substitued another ip xxx.xxx.xxx.80 as the IP into virtualmin for some reason unknown and also other virtual machines restored with local 192.xxx. ip addresses when they are restored to the new virtual machine this may have been done whilst I was test restoring one or two whilst still at home.
The test restores at home appeared to go well it was only when in the DC with the machine live that the issues came to light of course.
Clearly the different IP's are confusing the heck out of everything. I think the best way to solve this is to install a new copy of the virtual machine running Centos 05 and then connect up the correct IP xxx.90 to the correct ethernet connection before downloading and installing virtualmin as a clean install again. Presumably and hopefully this will cause virtualmin to pickup the correct default IP address this time?
In the travels around this I couldn't find anywhere that I could change the default IP address in virtualmin? I can update all the virtual servers with a cascading update, change to a private virtual IP but no where can I find out how to change the default shared IP once it seems to have gone in incorrectly.
I will update you on the results of this but any thoughts and observations for others doing a similar excercise as this would no doubt be appreciated at some stage by7 someone and indeed I am not quite out of the woods yet.
Whilst it is useful for virtualmin to automatically pick up a default address I am wondering if it would/could be better for it to be manually assigned somewhere? or is that the bit I am missing?
One other thought. The virtualmin on the server is 3.36 and I am using the latest .44 on the new server - any issues likely as a result of that?
Many thanks for your attention so far too - great response as always from you.
Hey Paul,
Yes, you can set this in Virtualmin. In the System Settings:Module Configuration look in the "Other Server Settings" section. Find the options labeled "Network interface for virtual addresses" and "Default virtual server IP address". One or both of these may need to be altered, depending on whether the IP that you want to be used is the one that is the "primary" interface on the system (eth0 on Linux systems) or one of the aliases (eth0:1, or similar).
In the vast majority of circumstances, if you're starting with a very simple base install and haven't done much configuration, the installation just does the right thing, so we're avoiding asking a bunch of questions during the install (the questions that are asked right now will go away once the installation script is smart enough to do the right thing in all circumstances that would cause it trouble). We probably do need to make these two Module Configuration options more obvious, since they do become important if you have a bunch of interfaces and aliases. It can also come into play if you're moving a server from a private network to a public one, though in that case, folks are going to have to do some legwork anyway.
Moving from 3.36 to 3.44 shouldn't be a major issue, but PHP execution got a major overhaul during that period. Mail delivery also got some work done. In both cases, I'm not sure that a backup/restore will enable those changes for you (but switching the PHP execution type for the domain once restored will update the PHP stuff). You could also upgrade to the latest Virtualmin on the old server, which would allow all of the postinstall stuff to run. Frankly, it's a good idea to always run the latest version of Virtualmin--we're not rolling out those new versions for our health. They're actually better. ;-)
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Hi Joe,
That was extremely useful thankyou. I have gone for a clean install on a new virtual machine. The default IP location is/was useful too as I am splitting off some of the domains to new machines later this year too and I suspect it may well come in useful then too.
I have gone smack into a new problem now though which is preventing me from seeing the results of the restores though which now come up in virtualmin with the correcd shared/default IP. The correct IP etc all now appears OK on the new build I just did.
However all I can see on going to a domain on a new IP even is the default apache page - even if I create a new domain from scratch.
I seem to recall having this same issue on the original virtualmin install many moons ago but for the life of me can't remember the fix nor find it on the forums. I suspect this is something easy to resolve at this stage but any tips as to how to solve that one would be most welcome.
Hey Paul,
This is almost certainly an extraneous NameVirtualHost *:80 entry in httpd.conf. Get rid of it. Apache will also be complaining about this in the /var/log/httpd/error_log.
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Joe - I am sure you are told this frequently but here it is again :-)
You are a star!!!!
That did indeed fix it. Zapping a few lines of code in the apache file did indeed resolve it.
I have now successfully migrated one Joomla based test domain from the old server backup using the default restore all settings. The site comes live on a new shared/default IP address Which seems to indicate all is order. I haven't fully tested it all yet but feel sure that this is the back of the problem broken now.
I have noticed already that the 64 bit Centos system is noticeably faster even when running in a virutal machine as a guest. It might just be due to a nice clean install at the moment of course but the difference seems to be to great for that alone.
I found on running the virtualmin check configuration that it did in fact complain about the apache configuration file anyway so the answer was under my nose anyway but this is a good check for people to run to give them pointers as to where any bugs may lie generally.
The product and your support of it on and off forum never cease to amaze me and you get another 20 out of 10 possible marks :-) Brill and thanks again.
Paul
Awesome, Paul. Thanks for the update.
And, of course you realize, I've gotta add that last line to our quotes file. That's a nice one. ;-)
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