Question on updates to PRO on Debian 4.0

Joe, tx for the, again, response.

Customer has either, or will register VM. There was never a question about it, but in teh quick pitch to ‘do it’, keeping all registrations under his business, I sang the praises of Webmin, VistualMin, blah blah blah… but for the dramatic finale, I looked him in the eye and said customer support means everything in this business, and that you had gone above and beyond answering questions. Repeat, customer service is EVERYTHING. I then said for that alone, do it. He didn’t blink, and neither should anyone else.

IOW, tx for the continual response. I know this gets arduous…

Based on the usage within his server environment, will be looking to build out a further hosted environment based on Joomla/Gallery/and other apps. Means more VM regs in a bit…

dh

Since it is topical, might as well ask… is it not advisable to try and upgrade VM GPL, in the Debian environment at all? Just wondered. Be nice to know so can either not do this in other environs, or if asked. I’ve been encouraging the use of Webmin and VirtualMin for instance to an associate who is running some hosted services on a data farm in France, and he is old school, doing things by hand. Have got him into WM and he likes it, but it would be a good thing to know whether he could upgrade VM GPL, or if that is not possible or advisable.

The larger point of course is, register it dude.

dh

Yeah, it’s a somewhat new recommendation, and the next version of install.sh will actually refuse to upgrade a Virtualmin GPL system (because the one in Virtualmin itself is going to continue to get better, while the install.sh will never know enough about the system to be as good/safe).

We’d recommend starting from a fresh system, if feasible to do so, and installing Virtualmin Professional with install.sh. It is slightly less great to start from a Virtualmin GPL system installed using our install.sh. And finally, the least appealing path is to start with a manually installed system running Webmin/Virtualmin/Usermin–unless you really know what you’re doing.

The reason for this is that we can’t safely change your configuration if the system is in production (and we assume it is in production if you are upgrading rather than installing fresh)…so, if you want to use any of our spam/AV processing features found in Professional, you’ll have to enable them manually (and maybe clean up residual configuration stuff from whatever mail processing you had setup before).

So, the more variables introduced in the way the system is installed and configured, the more likely you are to have to perform some manual steps to take advantage of all of the features of Virtualmin Professional. Our built-in upgrade is very unlikely to cause service interruptions…but it’s also very likely leave a few features disabled, because it can’t figure out how to enable it without risking breaking something special in your configuration.

We, of course, are happy to help if anything goes wrong–and we will support you regardless of how you installed. But, if you want to reduce the chances of anything going wrong, starting from a fresh OS install is the best way to do it.

Heh. And that is always a mixed sign when someone starts out a response with ‘heh’.

I plowed ahead in spite of warnings and threw one of the servers into an upgrade at the GPL level, even tho I will be getting my mitts onto the Pro version in a day or so. I proceeded to break several things. The kinds of things that I have seen others get real upset over. Not here… I went into the upgrade eyes wide open, and when things broke, the recovery was all about making it a learning experience. It was. And it took a couple hours to resurrect stuff, but hey, I wanted to see what would happen, and much learned.

But I understand your recommendations about fresh install into the Pro version and will do so. Breaking stuff doesn’t bother me nearly as much as it may other folks, and my suggestion is folks may want to employ some backup policies and some deep breathing exercises before they take some of these things one. But the rewards are great.

Hopefully all this preamble will go towards a successful migration into the Pro version. Tho several of the modules completely melted after the GPL try at upgrading, things came back together and most of this makes sense. The best would be to simply write and report ‘success’ instead of these inane questions… but as stated, the rewards are great if one just slows down, reads, listens, and proceeds.

Again, tx for your assistance. I understand what you are imparting in the last two posts…

dh