At some point in the past week, I believe my system updated itself. I didn’t notice a problem until today when I had an SSL cert fail to renew automatically, and I logged into the Virtualmin UI to work on that issue. What I noticed was the following:
Two of my sites / servers were missing
There were two other sites in their place, with names that were a string of numbers
I cannot delete the “number” sites using the Virtualmin UI
I tried restoring the two missing sites from backup, but got a conflict that the users already existed.
I attempted to validate my system, and got the message “The feature Administration user cannot be disabled.” Googling this, I see similar errors in the past, but none of those issues pertain to what I am seeing now with the missing / damaged sites.
I’m OK with whacking the two bad sites and restoring from backup, but I can’t seem to remove them - I get an error message “Domain 172306835046127 is not valid!”
I suspect the timing of the update was last week, because I run backups every Saturday morning, and the backups are there for 9/28, but not 10/5 for those two servers.
Any advice on how to remove the damaged servers, so that I can restore them from the good backups?
You don’t need to delete them. They can be repaired, though I don’t remember how, off-hand…searching…here’s one thread about it: Domains Showing as Numbers - #15 by Ilia (Ilia provides a command that restores just the metadata, which is what’s missing that leads to numbers in place of a domain name, and probably all that’s missing, unless something catastrophic happened).
There have been a few threads about this problem. It can happen when there’s a disk error, out of disk space, or power outage , or reboot, or OOM killer killing Webmin, while the domains are being updated (maybe during a confiig check or something else).
An update would not cause it, unless Virtualmin’s postinstall tasks were running when one of the above problems occurred.
Joe, thank you - that did it. I saw the issue was (supposedly) related to an update in one of the threads I found while searching, so I assumed that was the case here, too.
I did have a power outage last week, and came to the painful realization that my UPS needs a new battery. That was the likely cause.
The sites all still came up fine when I browsed to them, although admittedly both of them were “hello world” pages for servers I set up for friends as Dev sites to play with, so there wasn’t much there to begin with. DNS was working, Apache was working, it was just the metadata, apparently.
OK, follow up issue - the sites are back online, but my Dashboard is still not coming up correctly.
At the top of the page, I see the following:
Information!
Virtualmin’s configuration has not been checked since it was last updated. Click the button below to verify it now.
When I try to validate it, I get the following:
The Virtualmin repository is configured correctly
The feature Administration user cannot be disabled, as it is used by the following virtual servers : (List of servers, including the two I just restored, but others as well)
What’s the next step, to properly validate my config?