ARGH! - Uninstalling webalizer removed virtualmin !

Virtualmin
1

Hey all,
Could use some serious help. I have a VPS which was failing backups. Looking to move to a new VPS I wante d to get to the bottom of the backup problem, before migration. One of the child domains, was failing backup due to webalizer… so after spending an hour or so trying to figure it out, I decided “Well I don’t look at the reports anyway, I’ll just uninstall it”… so, using the “Server->Software Packages” area of WebMin, I searched for then removed the Webalizer package.

You can only imagine my horror and the sinking feeling in my stomach when the page refreshed to just WebMin… virtualmin was gone… GONE, taking all websites and domains with it !

None of my hosts are working. The files seem to still be around, but I can’t find phpmyadmin, sql, etc, virtualmin is hosed.

Not quite sure what to do next!? is there a way of transplanting whats left on top of a working virtualmin system ?

email, websites, the lot :frowning:

TIA
Si

2

Howdy,

Well, the first thing I would do is make a backup of the entire /etc dir, and all of it’s subdirs. If you can, you may even want to make a snapshot of your current server.

You may be missing packages such as Apache and Virtualmin, but their config files are likely still in place.

Once you do that, you should just be able to reinstall the packages that were uninstalled – you can see a list of those in the yum or apt logs in /var/log.

For the future, if you’re seeing an issue with backups and Webalizer, you could always just disable the Webalizer feature in Edit Virtual Server -> Enabled Features. Or you could post a note here and we could go over the issue you’re seeing.

Which distribution is it that you’re using there though?

I did some testing, as I wanted to make sure that folks couldn’t accidentally delete multiple packages like what happened in your case… I wasn’t able to reproduce an issue where multiple packages were deleted, unless I select the “Delete all dependencies” option.

Enabling that option would indeed do that since Webalizer is a dependency of Virtualmin, but I’m going to talk to Jamie about making that harder to do, or perhaps being more clear as to what all is being deleted.

-Eric

3

Thanks Eric,
You were indeed correct on all counts. I must have selected “remove all dependancies”. This I believe is a terminology thing. I wanted it to remove everything IT (webalizer) depended on, rather than everything that depended on it, perhaps that could be clearer.

Anyway, you’re right on the config stuff and the programs being deleted. I discovered that when apache failed to work due to apache2_suexec_custom missing, installed that and things started coming to life…

After reinstalling bind9, apache_suexec_custom, dovecot_common, dovecot_imaps, dovecot_pop3d, phpmyadmin, and some other bits, its looking more alive and receiving/forwarding email and web as expected. Some of the websites themselves are broken but I can trawl through the log to find out the rest of the missing packages before I tinker more with configs.

Thanks for your help Eric.

Bizarrely, I was preparing backups to migrate to a new server… that will have to wait until the dust settles here I think :slight_smile: Thankfully, I was able to use virtualmin backup-domain commands to backup all domains and restore them on my secondary VPS to check configs and things :slight_smile:

One last thing though, I can’t get the UI to look like it used to , using the virtualmin_framed_theme. Even when I install the theme and select it, the server still has just the webmin theme which makes it very hard to manage the virtualmin bits (when you’re used to the other theme). Any pointers on fixing that would be greatly appreciated.

Oh and I am using Ubuntu 10.04 LTS

Thanks again Eric.

Si

4

Rather ironically, I’m also still having the same webilizer backup issue seen below:

Creating backup for virtual server skibass.domain.com …
Copying virtual server configuration …
… done

Saving mail aliases ..
.. done

Saving mail and FTP users ..
.. done

Backing up mail and FTP user Cron jobs ..
.. none to backup

Copying Apache virtual host configuration ..
.. done

Copying Apache log files ..
.. done

Copying Webalizer configuration files ..
.. no logging directive found in webserver configuration!


    Saving Virtualmin configuration ..
    .. done

    Saving templates and plans ..
    .. done

    Saving email templates ..
    .. done

    Saving custom fields, links, categories and shells ..
    .. done

    Saving custom script installers ..
    .. done

    Saving scheduled backups ..
    .. done

    Saving FTP directory restrictions ..
    .. done

    Saving DKIM settings ..
    .. not installed

    Saving greylisting settings ..
    .. not installed

    Save mail rate limiting configuration ..
    .. not installed

    Saving mail server configuration ..
    .. done

.. done

Backup failed!

root@xtrahost:/root/backups#

Any ideas on how to fix that, other than uninstalling webalizer ? :wink:
thx

5

Howdy,

Well, if you don’t need Webalizer, you could always just disable that particular feature. You can do that in Edit Virtual Server -> Enabled Features.

As far as the theme goes – I think you said you did this already, but I just wanted to make sure… in Webmin -> Webmin -> Change Language and Theme, what are the options there set to?

6

Hey Eric,
Thanks for responding. I’ve disabled webalizer and all seems good now, so thanks for that.

The theme issue (as with the original issue) was a PEBKAC problem. I was attempting to use the WebMin->Web Configuration->Themes section to activate a new theme. which wasn’t working.

When I used Webmin -> Webmin -> Change language and theme as you suggest, it all works fine :slight_smile:

Ok - feeling REALLy stupid now :slight_smile: I guess it serves me right for only touching this stuff once in a blue moon.

Thanks for your patience and help so far.

Si

7

Howdy,

I’m glad it’s working for you now!

Webmin didn’t make it particularly clear what it was going to remove, and we’d like to get that fixed. You didn’t have a way of knowing exactly what would happen there.

That’s on our list of things to go over at our meeting this week, we’d like to make sure that doesn’t happen to anyone else.

You mentioned that you were preparing backups to migrate to a new server – there is documentation here regarding the procedure to perform a migration:

http://virtualmin.com/documentation/system/migrate

-Eric

8

Thanks Eric, thats the documentation I’m following :slight_smile:

Thanks
Si