After reading the FAQ's and seeing the massive warnings about upgrading from the GPL version to the PRO version it looks like getting it isn't a wise thing. So I am wondering why after all the years of VM being totally free then switching to a dual license version with the PRO why the upgrading hasn't been fixed?
What I understand is if I upgrade there is a 50-50 chance it might break. If it breaks does this mean I will be forced to buy the installation help package just to get it working again? That doesn't seem to be fair thing if that is the case.
If I don't have to buy that install help how long will it take to get help to fix any problems that arise? Is the forum the only way to get that help or is Joe or Jamie going to log into my box and fix what ever broke?
I want to upgrade but at this point just doing that looks scary.
Hey Scott,
Perhaps the FAQs are a bit more dire about upgrades than is necessary at this point. ;-)
Upgrades from GPL are currently supported in the install.sh, but we still want to make sure we scare people into backing up their system before even <i>thinking</i> about upgrading. We'd also like to make sure they think about the differences, if any, between the way we set things up and the way they set things up in their GPL installation.
In short, it isn't so much that we need to "fix" upgrades--they generally work, if your GPL system is configured the same (or pretty close to the same) as our default configuration. If it isn't, you'll have to make some configuration changes to get back to "working" after the install. And the install.sh definitely cannot be expected to know exactly how you've configured things--too many variables there.
And if your system is vastly different from our defaults (i.e. sendmail or qmail for mail being the obvious big difference), then you'll not want to use install.sh at all--you'll want to perform a manual installation of the Professional packages.
Finally, "If it breaks does this mean I will be forced to buy the installation help package just to get it working again? That doesn't seem to be fair thing if that is the case." Definitely not. I'll help you with any upgrade problems that arise at no charge, and assuming you have known good backups, we'll be able to get you back up and running without any trouble. (We're providing installation service for free to anyone if the install.sh fails for any reason on any supported platform. So, really, no one needs to buy installation support during the EA period.)
So, upgrading isn't all that scary at this point--the problems that come up might look scary (like, say, your Sendmail server gets replaced by Postfix and all of your existing virtual mail domains seem to disappear), but really aren't (the sendmail config is still there...we'd just need to switch back to using sendmail).
But, and I'm gonna say it once more because I never want to have to tell someone "some of your data is gone", make sure you have a known good backup of the system before performing an upgrade!
We usually have about a 24 hour turnaround on logging into folks boxes to help rectify any specific troubles. File a customer issue with a description of any problems that arise, and if it's urgent mail over your box details at the same time to joe@virtualmin.com so I can get started ASAP on solving the problem directly.
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What needs to be backed up? The entire computer? Or just certain files like /etc/passwd and such?
Maybe you should define what files should be backed up that might be modified by the installation.
Doing a entire system backup technically takes another computer to mirror it.
Hey Scott,
<i>What needs to be backed up? The entire computer? Or just certain files like /etc/passwd and such?</i>
I'd like very much to convince you to keep regular backups of the entire system. You'll thank me one day. Really, you will. ;-)
<i>Doing a entire system backup technically takes another computer to mirror it.</i>
Not at all. Webmin includes a Filesystem Backup module which you can use to archive and compress the entire system into about half its normal size and store it on a remote host.
Here's our virtualmin.com system partition showing 32GB of disk usage:
/dev/sda3 66G 32G 31G 52% /
And the remotely mounted network storage partition where we backup weekly (full system dump) and nightly (diffs since the previous full backup):
//70.85.125.7/c24907-1
40G 16G 25G 40% /mnt/backup
Note that even keeping a a full backup weekly plus a nightly diff backup only requires about half the space of the uncompressed system usage. The full system backup is a little smaller at 14G:
[[root@www /]]# ls -lh /mnt/backup/
total 16G
-rwxr--r-- 1 1827 1827 2.7G Jan 10 06:21 daily-increments
-rwxr--r-- 1 1827 1827 14G Jan 7 08:13 weekly-full
Most hosting providers will rent you enough space on a network storage device to use for backups for about $10-$30 per month. Ours is stored on the NAS at the host where we keep Virtualmin.com. (Though the new S3 backup feature in Virtualmin is pretty cool, and I suspect we'll start keeping secondary backups of our most important domains and databases there, too.)
But, since you insist:
<i>Maybe you should define what files should be backed up that might be modified by the installation.</i>
Backup all of /etc in a manner that allows you to easily access anything in it. A tarball in /root is what I'd probably do:
tar czvf etc-backup.tar.gz /etc
Webmin has a backup configuration files feature that can probably substitute for this, though it is specific about what it backs up, and probably doesn't cover everything we'll poke at during install.
The config files found in /etc are quite small. A couple of MB, generally, though a Virtualmin system using bandwidth monitoring can push that up a little bit.
Backup your domains using the Virtualmin backup feature. We aren't going to touch your domains during install, as far as I recall, but we'll all feel better if you have that data backed up (again, I'd like to convince you to back it up regularly even when not planning an imminent upgrade). The Virtualmin metadata lives in /etc/webmin/virtual-server, so we've already got a backup of it...but it won't hurt to have a fully restorable version of each of your domains.
If you have any packages installed from tarball installed into the normal system paths (/usr/bin, /usr/sbin, /bin, /sbin), then I'd suggest never doing that again. Also back them up, because we'll probably overwrite them when our RPMs or debs install. This probably doesn't apply to anyone here, but I've seen it done. ;-)
I think that's all we mess with.
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Ok I bought the 50 domain license -- Hope you're around tomorrow incase all hell breaks lose here.
I think I'll do the manual install. The auto-install seems to be something I certainly do not want to do here.
Did the manual upgrade...... went just fine with no issues at all here :)
Now I got another question. How do I take advantage of the auto-update that webmin uses under the "Upgrade Webmin" section so that I cant get any new releases automatically for the VM Pro versions ?
Hey Scott,
We generally use the native package manager of the OS for updates to the Virtualmin Professional packages, and it'll depend on your OS for how you configure that.
I don't believe the normal Webmin update can deal with our password-protected wbm package directories yet...
But Jamie has written a Webmin package manager specifically for the Virtualmin packages (and the binaries that it depends on) for those systems that don't have proper package management. Since we aren't yet supporting any of those systems, I haven't added the necessary meta-data to the repository.
I'd probably recommend you install the RPM or deb packages (after backing up your /etc/webmin directory), and then setup the package manager appropriately for our software repos. I can give you specific details if I know your OS/version/arch.
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I see. Then I guess I will have to figure out something else.
I use mandriva but I prefer to not use urpmi because mandriva is very very slow in issuing updates and I want to make sure that webmin is always up-to-date.
I'll just manually update until I can write a module that will do it for me.
<i>I see. Then I guess I will have to figure out something else.
I use mandriva but I prefer to not use urpmi because mandriva is very very slow in issuing updates and I want to make sure that webmin is always up-to-date.</i>
We provide a Webmin package in our repository, which is always the current version (and sometimes the devel version if there is a bugfix written just for Virtualmin users). You don't need to wait for the Mandriva updates of Webmin.
If you do opt to give urpmi a try, you could run:
urpmi.addmedia virtualmin-universal http://$SERIAL:$KEY@software.virtualmin.com/universal
And:
urpmi.addmedia virtualmin http://$SERIAL:$KEY@software.virtualmin.com/$os_type/$os_version/$cputype
To setup the repos. There are a number of environment variables there that would need to be set. Or you could just replace them manually. On Mandriva we don't yet have x86_64 builds of the binaries (I'm still trying to get the 64 bit version running under qemu or KVM).
Your serial number and license key are on the http://www.virtualmin.com/serial page. Same ones you used to login to the software server. (And they should also exist in /etc/virtualmin-license)
The first repo above is where all of the perl-only, non-OS specific, packages live. Webmin, Usermin, all of the modules. So, if you only want to use our core packages that's what you'll use. If you want our Apache and some other components, you could add the other.
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Can you explain more in depth what the second repo will do?
What files are there? Apache/Sendmail version?
Also I am using 2007 and not 2006 so if those packages are for 2006 they may not work.
<i>Can you explain more in depth what the second repo will do?
What files are there? Apache/Sendmail version?</i>
Apache or mod_suexec if it can be distributed separately, whatever version the OS is currently distributing for that version (rebuilt with suexec docroot set to /home). No sendmail at all. No postfix either, though that is what we setup by default. It'll also have whatever other packages are missing from the base OS--this varies by OS. Looks like awstats, dovecot, scponly and webalizer are all in the repo. I'm surprised that webalizer isn't included in Mandriva by default. Maybe it is and I rebuilt it to provide a more sane configuration...not sure off-hand.
<i>Also I am using 2007 and not 2006 so if those packages are for 2006 they may not work.</i>
I did some testing on 2007, but I don't recall whether we need new packages for it. You're the first to report using it, so I haven't spent any time on it. I do have it running under qemu, though, so it's reasonably easy to add support if you'd find it useful (though the 64 bit version doesn't want to install for me, so it may be a while before I can get x86_64 packages rolled out for that platform).
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Ok last question.
If I use the first repo can I still run the auto-update inside webmin to check for new modules ? If I can will it also update VM Pro and NOT the GPL one as well?
I guess that is the real question here, if I use the "Update modules on schedule" cron job I am worried that it will install the GPL instead of the Pro version.
Also I tried that Amazon S3 storage and I couldn't get it to work.
Keeps telling me "Failed to save scheduled backup : Missing or invalid S3 secret key" and I have made sure a dozen times the secret key was correct.
I also have no idea what a "Amazon S3 bucket" is.
Documentation is nill on this feature as well.
I couldn't get it to work, but I eventually did.
#1, make sure you copy/paste it into notepad then copy it over to your browser.
#2, make sure the date on your server is up to date, otherwise amazon complains.