Migrating existing sites, email and DNS to VirtualMin

Virtualmin
1

I have a number of existing sites on several legacy servers that I want to migrate to one or more VirtualMin boxes. I’ve played with VirtualMin for a while but never really used it fully so I’d appreciate some advice as to the best way to migrate these old sites.

If I understand correctly I need to create a new “Virtual Server” for each site (adding aliases as required). Is the best (“right”) way to transfer the old content (these are all static sites so it’s just HTML/CSS/images/etc) creating separate FTP accounts for each site?

For email, I really want to transfer accounts across using the same usernames and passwords as the users are already using. In some cases they’re using unix usernames, in other cases the user will typically be in the form user@domain (it depends which server they’re being migrated from). I’d like to look at pulling email across from the old servers as well; I’m assuming that with the old usernames and passwords I could just use something like fetchmail to retrieve the email and inject it into the local mailserver, albeit that people will see old email with new message IDs - other suggestions welcomed!

For DNS: I assume it’s just a question of setting things up the things I need manually then updating the DNS server records for the domain so unless there are any things to worry about I can probably work this one out.

It’s really the email that worries me, but I’d like to know I’m on the right track with the rest too.

2

That sounds about right, there are a few ways to copy the email over, my old system stored mail in the “mbox” format. Virtualmin uses the “maildir” format by default, so you can’t just copy the files over. If your old server uses the “maildir” format, then you can just copy the directories over.

What I did for DNS was to allow zone transfers from the new Virtualmin server, then created the DNS zones as slaves, pulled over the zones, then converted them to master.

There is some issue with having a @ sign in the username, I think Virtualmin does some kind of workaround, but I stay away from @'s in usernames. Since you are moving it might not be a bad idea to just use a username with no @ signs, that way you don’t have to remember who has @'s and who doesn’t.