After letting webmin take over a user to change it, mail password won't work anymore

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#1 Tue, 01/14/2014 - 15:39
EcchiOli

After letting webmin take over a user to change it, mail password won't work anymore

Hello,

I wanted to clone the username being master of a virtual server, in order to grant a developer extended rights through SSH, and while doing that, webmin told me this username was for Virtualmin, asking for a confirmation. Silly me, I gave that confirmation.

Since that, even though I can still log in by SSH as the admin of that virtual server, I can't receive mail anymore to this account, neither to the main email or to the alias I usually use. Same password supposedly, but not in reality (and, yeah, I know about the username.domain instead of just username, to provide for credentials).

From Virtualmin > Users > Username (admin of the virtual server) > Fifty percent of the time, if I click "log in to usermin", I will be told "Failed to save mailbox : Invalid PID file". The other half of the time, it works. The function to re-send sign up email only opens up in a new window the main window.

In Webmin, System, Users and Groups, I manually changed the password to a new one, which worked for SSL logins, but not for email fetching.

So... This is my mistake first and foremost, I shouldn't have let webmin take control of the username. My mistake. Not blaming virtualmin.

Please, would someone know how to fix it ?

(I updated my initial post : you can disregard the following chapter, it would be simple to move the files to another home directory, delete the virtual server and re-create it. But I'd really prefer to fix this issue rather than give up, and incidentally lose the virtual server's customizations.) Last option, I thought of deleting the virtual server and re-creating it. But I have over 100 GB of data hosted in there, I can't afford to lose it. Ironically enough, because of those 100 GB of data (in a directory after /public_html/), this is the only of my virtual servers that is NOT backed up though virtualmin's wonderful backup features (please whip me.)

If you know how to fix it, or how to delete-and-re-create the virtual server without losing the hosted files, I will be most grateful :)

Kind regards, Oliver

Wed, 01/15/2014 - 01:53
Locutus

Maybe move the data away from the user's home directory to a safe place, then recreate the virtual server, and move the files back?

Wed, 01/15/2014 - 16:33
EcchiOli

Hello Locutus, and thanks for your answer !

It's true, it could work, moving the files to another folder, deleting the virtual server, and re-creating it. But I'm the kind of guy who prefers to fix things rather than start them over ;)

This virtual server already has its own customizations, rules for the backups, settings, I feel that it would be a sad loss of time to start it over from scratch. And it would feel so much more pleasant to have managed to fix it, haha.

Well, I still searched for solutions, couldn't find any yet, I'll come back to report it here if I eventually find how to do it. If someone else knows, thank you VERY much to share the information :)

Thu, 01/16/2014 - 04:56
Locutus

Considering the amount of things you changed and that are going wrong now, it'll probably be very hard to debug this remotely. I guess it'd be advisable to either have someone log in to your system directly to take a look at it, or move the public_html files away, then take a Virtualmin backup of the domain, delete it and restore the backup. (The latter might feel like "giving up", but is certainly the quicker way to solve it.)

That might work, since it recreates the potentially erroneous user then. Only issue might be if the Virtualmin backup also contains whatever causes the problems now. That's hard to say though without knowing precisely what's wrong.

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