I want to setup a new virtualmin server with the same settings as the old one as regards things like account plans, new server setup scripts, fail2ban error checks, available modules, virtualmin backup schedules, etc… I do not want to move current websites to this new server, only to have a blank new alternate.
I was hoping to be able to do this in one go instead of trying to remember and then copy or manually duplicate every bit and piece (mostly because of the remembering part).
An old post from 2011 suggested that I could restore virtualmin.tar.gz and get most stuff but I got this result:
Is there a list of files somewhere that I can grab manually? I found my way to /etc/webmin/virtual-server/templates from a recent post and copied that. I am looking for all of that “stuff” so that I can have a similarly configured second virtualmin server.
Thank you. For the record you also appear to have to select at least something from the other half of the options or it gives the same message (I had it on “Only selected” with nothing selected on the left side and everything checked on the right and got the same result, selecting all on the left and then checking all of the boxes on the right did the trick though).
Yeah, we need to rethink this UI, somehow. It’s quite unintuitive. @Jamie@Ilia y’all have any ideas on how we can make it more obvious when someone wants to just restore Virtualmin settings and not any domains?
Recent updates separated domain and Virtualmin global settings backup/restore into different accordions, but I’m not sure if that’s enough.
If I were designing it, I’d have done it differently—moving Virtualmin-related backups/restores to a dedicated UI page and creating a separate CLI command. Domain backups and restores wouldn’t reference Virtualmin global configurations at all.
That said, I don’t like these being mixed together and would prefer a complete separation, but this would require Jamie’s input or approval at least.
Yeah, that makes sense. I think, intuitively, people probably aren’t thinking of global Virtualmin settings as part of domain backups, and it’s probably a usability mistake to conflate them. I mean, the backup form should allow backing up global Virtualmin settings, but it should probably be clearly delineated as “Global Virtualmin Settings” (or whatever) and “Domain” stuff, and similarly there should be a clear path to restore only one or the other.
We could certainly do this without too much effort. The only downside is that it would be harder to create a single consolidated backup of all domains and all global settings on the one schedule.
I don’t see any reason to remove it from the backup domains page.
I’m not sure I understand what Ilia is suggesting, but it should certainly be possible to schedule “backup everything”. (Users already fail to understand that that doesn’t actually backup everything on the system. It’s already needing better docs and textual clues in the UI about what Virtualmin backup/restore can and cannot do. The fact that we never backup the whole Apache configuration as part of a Virtualmin backup is confusing for some users, for example.)
We could in theory have two separate pages, one for domain backups and one for global config backups. But I’m OK with leaving them on the same page, just more separated so it’s clear that global configs are different from domains.
The problem in this topic is that the user didn’t see how to restore only global settings, and the UI made it tricky even once they spotted the section for it in the UI (they had to click through and attempt to restore a few times, getting mysterious errors every time until they’d found the right incantations to make it work). Backing up wasn’t where the UI failed them (though it’s also maybe less obvious than it should be).
If we split it into two separate pages, there should still be an option to schedule it. It’s just that the global Virtualmin settings aren’t related to domain backup. It’s perfectly clear why we are doing it, as it was much simpler to implement in the first place, but I don’t think it’s the best approach.
To be clear, the latest changes have it displayed like this, yet it’s still not on two separate pages:
As y’all make any changes to this
do not forget the many users who already have learnt the existing system and its complexity understand it enough and manage to use it.
this sounds like a big change and a recipe for potential confusion
will existing backups/transfers/procedures still work.
helping new users is great but don’t throw the out withe the
There would be a minimal learning curve, with just a separate link offering the same functionality, but “Features and settings” and “Global settings” would be on different pages.
But again, I believe these should be on completely separate page. The scheduled backups page could consolidate the display of domain and global configurations, but bundling global configuration with domain backups doesn’t seem logically correct to me. A domain backup should only include domain-related data, not system configuration files from /etc…