In-place Squeeze to Wheezy upgrade rendered Virtualmin (Pro) and Webmin Inop

Hi:

After an in-place Debian upgrade, Virtualmin and Webmin were inoperative. I was not the tech that implemented the upgrade but was the recipient that the management software was inop so I needed to clean up the mess. I reinstalled Webmin (I think bad for retaining the Virtualmin meta data). The /virtual-server/domains folder within /etc/webmin does not exist -- I am assuming this was overwritten with the new Webmin install. However, the websites within /home still exist and function -- with caveats. MySQL was broken on one site, a Word Press site only displayed a blank white landing page and had many PHP errors (version differences) when trying to move to a new server. I eventually restored this site to a different server and all was good.

My question: Is there a way to install Virtualmin back on the machine and integrate the sites back in or is this a lost cause. The server is due for retirement anyway.

Thanks,

Jim

Status: 
Active

Comments

Howdy -- we're sorry to hear that you're having trouble during your OS upgrade!

The process of upgrading the OS in-place is something we heavily test, and should actually work well. We have instructions for performing that here:

https://www.virtualmin.com/documentation/system/os/debian-squeeze-to-whe...

The Webmin and Virtualmin software for Squeeze and Wheezy are the same, and there wouldn't need to be changed or upgraded during the upgrade process. Even if they were though upgrading Virtualmin doesn't remove the /etc/webmin/virtual-server/domains directory.

However, if during the upgrade process Virtualmin was fully removed for some reason, that could potentially cause what you're seeing.

As far as fixing the issues --

Do you happen to have a backup of the /etc directory?

If so, and the /etc/webmin directory from there could be recovered, that will make fixing that up a lot easier.

If not, it's still possible to import your existing sites back into Virtualmin, but it'll take some time to do so.

What you could do is use the Add Servers -> Import Virtual Servers screen, and import them into Virtualmin one at a time. That would be time consuming, unfortunately, but would ultimately work for importing your various domains.