I’m migrating from one hosting provider to another. I followed the " How to Migrate to a New Server" doc, but when I tried restoring it crashed on creating a username and said username _default_hostname was taken.
My current server is call.myserver.com and my new server is david.myserver.com. Can I just remove all the ‘call’ backup files from /root/backups/ directory before running the restore-domains stuff, or is there a better way?
Let me add a bit more context here… maybe I didn’t do something right to begin with. I initially setup my machine as call.mydomain.com. Then I installed Virtualmin and setup from scratch. After everything was setup, I then created a virtual server mydomain.com. The VS mydomain.com does not have a subserver call, and there is no call.mydmain.com virtual server, but the dns records for mydomain.com do reference call.
Whew… hope that made sense. So, this leads me to a few questions. Is there a better way to do this? Since I’m “rebuilding” this new setup, should I just skip the myserver.com domain and create it as needed from scratch again?
Update: I pulled the call files to a HOLDING folder and the migrate went well this time. Not sure what happened last time, but I’ll advise further of any additional issues. Notating here for reference.
Update2: Ugh… lots of DNS issues. Going to try migrating using the same hostname of call.
Okay… this is frustrating. Following the how-to-migrate-to-a-new-server exactly, I get errors whether I use the same hostname or a different one. Now that I’m using call, I get “your system is not ready for use by Virtualmin : Errors were found in your system’s BIND configuration : zone call.mydomain.com/IN: NS ‘ns1.call.mydomain.com’ has no address records (A or AAAA), zone call.mydomain.com/IN: not loaded due to errors., _default/call.mydomain.com/IN: bad zone”
Can someone look at the documentation and update it? I don’t mind a doing clean install of virtualmin, but from the instructions I shouldn’t have to.
I recently did a migrate myself. I installed the OS on the new server and then installed Virtualmin on it like a fresh install. I made my optimizations on it, then changed IP address of the domains in my DNS (not managed by virtualmin).
After that I used Manage Virtual Server > Transfer Virtual Server on the old server to move domains to the new ones - one by one. Had no issues.
Keep in mind, my migration was from Ubuntu 20 to Ubuntu 24. Both systems were running the same version of Virtualmin and both had the same FQDN configured. My DNS is not managed by virtualmin. These differences could create errors in your case.
There are much more knowledgeable people here though. I’m a noob myself.
SUCCESS!!! Yea, I know I’m blowing up my own thread, but after 8 different tries it finally worked. There are a few key additions that need to be in the howto that I’ll elaborate on later. Heading out to vacation, so may be a day or two.