Tuesday, May 29, 2007

Plesk and Debian disaster

I was doing some server maintenance on one of my servers which houses a Plesk install. The base is Debian and a simple apt-get upgrade, as employed on plenty of previous occasions, updated the packages that needed updating.

Unfortunately, the sources.list for apt were configured to get the latest stable version and Debian 3.1 has recently moved to Debian 4 (etch). Unfortunately, as I have since found, Plesk 8.1 doesn't like etch and despite my best attempts to roll back the changes, all was in vain.

Better still, the admin functions that allow migration of accounts didn't work. So, I was left delving into the mysql psa database to regenerate the installation on another machine before migrating the /var/www/vhosts and /var/qmail/mailnames directories. That of course meant hand creating all clients, domains, email, forwards, aliases, subdomains.......... the list seems endless.

All my servers have now have their sources.list changed to getting 3.1 updates only. I'll not do that again.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

There are several packages which need to be excluded from apt-get updates when using Plesk. We run Debian and FreeBSD boxes with various version of Plesk, and do nightly rsync backups. These backups have saved our butts on many occasions. I would also suggest making an rsync snapshot of your Debian system prior to running apt-get upgrade. Then, if the upgrade fails, or breaks something in Plesk, you simply restore and it's like nothing ever happened. A common rsync command to backup a Debian box would look like this:

rsync -av --exclude /proc/ --exclude /dev/ --exclude /sys / root@remote.rsync.server:/path/to/backup

You will, of course need to setup an rsync server, or install an additional drive in your Plesk machine to store rsync backups.