I had to discover that the virtualmin backup feature (which is cool) fails completely without explicit notice on all virtual servers that have no zone-file in bind.
I have several virtual servers which do not need a dns domain set up because the dns server and also mail is on another host. The remote dns server only points to my virtualmin server with the A-Name entry for web.
If I set up the domain for the web/virtual server on my virtualmin I am not able to send mails because my server thinks that he has to deliver them locally. So I removed the corresponding zones from bind and everything worked fine.
But virtualmin skips out these servers from the backup now! The "error" is "no DNS Entry found!" or something like that, which is correct and OK, but why does the backup stop and skips the server completely?
I do not want to set up “dummy” DNS zone-files for the domain with MX-Records pointing to the original remote mail server (what if they change? I won’t get informed.)
Hmm, so is the DNS feature within Virtualmin disabled for those Virtual Servers?
In theory, if Virtualmin doesn’t think there should be DNS, there shouldn’t be a problem doing the backups. OTOH, if DNS were enabled within Virtualmin, but the zone files were ever manually removed, it’s possible that confused the backup tool.
-Eric
I have activated the option to continue backups on errors. However this just skips to the next virtual server to backup but does not complete the backup on the virtual server which had the "error". (I discovered this only by accident by looking through the backups)
> you shouldn’t pull stuff out from under virtualmin without letting it know.
But isn’t the credo of virtualmin (or webmin?) that you can administrate the underlying linux system like there was no virtualmin and virtualmin should adapt to the changes made in the config files without having its own “meta-config-layer”? (Which I think is the best feature of the webmin/virtualmin system)
I have activated the option to continue backups on errors. However this just skips to the next virtual server to backup but does not complete the backup on the virtual server which had the "error".
That’s bug-like. Backups should try very hard to get everything (but should complain loudly when they can’t get everything they think they should have). It sounds like we’re only doing the complaining part and not the “try very hard to get everything”.
But isn't the credo of virtualmin (or webmin?) that you can administrate the underlying linux system like there was no virtualmin and virtualmin should adapt to the changes made in the config files without having its own "meta-config-layer"?
Yes, actually, that’s true, as much as possible. In Virtualmin we have to leave behind some of the Webmin Way (which is pretty much completely reliant on the underlying system, and has practically no metadata of its own). But the underlying system has no concept of a “virtual server” that provides mailboxes, DNS, web, mailing lists, Subversion repos, etc. So, a pure metadata-less backup wouldn’t even know where to find your DNS information, much less know that it was associated with a particular user.
Anyway, I’ll file a ticket about missing files resulting in skippage of the rest of the virtual server backup. That’s a bit too fragile for comfort.
I was looking into this bug, and wasn’t able to re-produce the problem of a backup failing completely if the zone file was missing. Assuming you have the ‘Continue with other features and servers’ option selected on the backup form that is…
Could you post the full backup output here?
By the way, if you have a domain for which mail is delivered to another server, you should un-check the ‘Mail for domain’ feature on the virtual server creation form. This will prevent the server from trying to deliver mail locally, and you can then add the appropriate MX records to your DNS domain to deliver to the correct mail server.
OK, I will set up a dummy virtual server with dns and then comment out the zone on the named.conf. But I can do this at the earliest after 8.5.2009, because I am in holiday.
I had virtualmin backup all the servers with all the features and one file per server sending the file to a remote ftp. I got no tar.gz files for the five servers whith commented-out zones. So the backup continued with the other servers but did not finish the ones with the errors in named.conf.
you can then add the appropriate MX records to your DNS domain to deliver to the correct mail server.
I was looking for a way without having to do that. I don’t want to manage the MX entries for the remote servers when they are not really used.
I’d be interested to see the output from the backup, if you have it… a failure of just the DNS zone shouldn’t stop the whole domain from being transferred.
