Hi, I have a question about the virtualmin backup files. I just wanted to use a backup file to restore some specific files. When decompressing the tar.bz2 file I get a folder with 100+ subfolders and the files I’m looking for (in the website root) are distributed over several of the folders with seemingly no logic at all. These folder have names that don’t have any meaning like ‘11324444776’, ‘11324444775’… Is this normal?
I use Virtualmin 3.75 on Debian Etch. Backups are uploaded to another Debian server. My workstation (where I check the files) is on Mac OS 10.6.2.
The backups just take the files and directories as-is, and back them up. It’s not changing the folder structure, or moving things around.
The only exception is that it does create a hidden folder called .backup, where it stores various config data for your domain, including DNS data, Apache VirtualHosts, the MySQL backups, and the like.
If that’s not what you’re seeing, something may be awry
Is it possible it’s a hardware problem? If you look in your dmesg output, do you see any kernel errors towards the end that suggest any sort of problem?
Thanks Eric, I’m afraid I’m a little bit of a noob trying to get this ok (graphic designer hosting my own websites).
Something like this:
[91710.656424] UDP: bad checksum. From xx.xx.xx.xx:1049 to xx.xx.xx.xx:15398 ulen 56
[5082148.483449] device eth0 entered promiscuous mode
[5082391.567707] device eth0 left promiscuous mode
Hrm, are you running that stuff from a server out on the Net somewhere, or is this also your desktop?
The “promiscuous mode” lines there are a bit unusual for a server… if that’s not your desktop, I’d probably use now as a time to verify that all your software is fully up to date, and to install tools like rkhunter and chkrootkit (both available in Debian’s repository), and run those to make sure they don’t see anything out of the ordinary.
Thanks again for the quick reply. I’m running this ‘on the web’. The first IP in the first line seems to be some to be some rather obscure server (prime.net.ph). Though this may be strange, I don’t get the idea this is causing the backup problem or am I wrong?
Well, I don’t see anything in the output above that would directly explain the phenomenon you’re seeing, so I was taking a few wild guesses in another direction.
Virtualmin isn’t going to just make up folder names when performing backups, so something on your system is awry… I just don’t know what yet
Did you by chance verify that those strange folders didn’t currently exist on your server?
Ie, could something along the way have created them?
F*¨ck-a-duck, the problem was on my workstation. It seems Snow Leopard doesn’t like bz2… I got no errors expanding with stuffit expander and bzip2 seems not to be installed on the backup server so I could not check there. Feel like a fool, but now I’m almost sure this was a non-issue.
Eric, thank you very very much for your effort!
One of your options moving forward, is that you could always switch the backup format to use either .gz, or even .zip files.
Now, back to your dmesg output – I find those messages about your ethernet device going into promiscuous mode to be a bit unusual, I’d still recommend running rkhunter and chkrootkit to do a quick check and make sure nothing bad is going on
