You already have one server with a dkim key pair and use virtualmin “DomainKeys Identified Mail”:
Edit the dkim option on the source server and add the new domain (I personally use sub domains for all my servers) so for example if your initial mail server is s1.domain.com and your new server (the one you will copy the dkim key on) is s2.domain.com your “Domains to sign for” section must contain:
s1.domain.com
s1
s2.domain.com
s2
Save this on the source server. The key will be updated….
The private key on my ubuntu server is filed under: /etc/dkim.key
If your target server is the same [OS], first of all proceed to enable DKIM on the virtualmin “DomainKeys Identified Mail”, you may want to use the same details than the source server in the “Domains to sign for” section & “Save”, this will create the key pairs.
I personally then disabled dkim on the TARGET server before doing the next step, but it might not be required(!?).
When complete, edit the /etc/dkim.key on the TARGET server with vi or otherwise replace the private key with the one from the SOURCE server (you should make a backup of the file first, always do a backup!).
Go back to the virtualmin “DomainKeys Identified Mail” in the TARGET server page and enable the dkim outgoing email but with the option “Force generation of new private key?” to “NO” and “Save”
The private key will then be read from the /etc/dkim.key and used to generate the exact same public and DKIM DNS records for domains as the source server together with all the required settings to make it work.
You’re all set and the DNS can be edited if the DKIM DNS records for domains has changed, mine does not seem to have.
When, like me, you get paranoid to losing your data or web server functionality…
I have created a little perl script to allow the synchronization of MySQL databases and /home between my Webservers.
The master server (where the script runs from) is the main production server, the salve server is on standby just in case.
I can appreciate that the passwords are clearly inserted in the script and it is a security issue. Nonetheless, I am the only admin and no other users have ftp or other privileges on both servers. I am sure that there is a way to prevent this but I am happy with the current situation and, obviously I am also making a regular backup of the master server on an external backup provider (I use rsync.net).
#!/usr/bin/perl
# Performs a synchronisation of home folder and dumps sql databases
# from one Virtual server to another using rsync and secure shell
#
# Written by G.Serex Sharpnet UK (c) 03.12.2020
# Var definitions
############### SQL Config #############
# SQL root username
$username = "root";
# Local SQL root password
$password = "localmysqlpassword";
# Remote SQL root password
$rpassword = "remotemysqlpassword";
# The dumped files path . (absolute path + trailing / please)
$dumped_dbs_path = "/root/mysql/";
# The dumped file name
$dumped_db = "dump.sql";
# Name of the database to exclude from the dump (here the mysql and sys are obviously dedicated to each server, so don't dump them!)
$exclude_database = "mysql,sys,information_schema,performance_schema";
################ SSH Config #################
# The remote host name
$remotehost = "ipaddress";
#The ssh username
$sshusername = "root";
#The ssh port
$sshport = "xx";
#____ E N D _ V A R _ D E F S. ________________
# First check and optimise the lot.
# A little house keeping
system("/usr/bin/mysqlcheck --optimize --all-databases --auto-repair -u $username -p$password");
# Dump the dbs
system("/usr/bin/mysqlpump -u $username -p$password --exclude-databases=$exclude_database --add-drop-table --result-file=$dumped_dbs_path$dumped_db");
# Transfer them abroad
system("/usr/bin/rsync -avz -e 'ssh -p $sshport' $dumped_dbs_path $sshusername\@$remotehost:$dumped_dbs_path");
# Restore the dump abroad
system("/usr/bin/ssh -p $sshport $sshusername\@$remotehost 'mysql -u root -p$rpassword < $dumped_dbs_path$dumped_db'");
# rsync the home directory
system("/usr/bin/rsync -avz --delete -e 'ssh -p $sshport' /home/ $sshusername\@$remotehost:/home");
exit;
After that, be prepared to get a lot of emails about the blocked IPs for the set time (default is 3600 seconds or 1 hour). They eventually taper out with the most offending IP’s getting permanently blocked 🙂
In this series of Best Practice articles I talk about migrating websites and emails from a Plesk 11 run server to a Virtualmin run server. It describes in details the steps involved, including the eventual pitfalls and other thing I came across whilst doing it. Note that this documentation is addressed to people with medium expertise in linux/system administration.
Useful customisation
Most of VM defaul settings are fine, however in order to make it a little easier to migrate websites, the following mods are useful.
Server Template – Apache directives
As Plesk websites are hosted under $Documentroot/httpdocs this can be set by default before creating website by editing the Apache website default config:
VM Menu > Server Templates > Default Settings > Edit template section: apache website
Change: DocumentRoot ${HOME}/public_html
To: DocumentRoot ${HOME}/httpdocs
Change: <Directory ${HOME}/public_html>
To: <Directory ${HOME}/httpdocs>
Under “Users’ website subdirectory to create“.
Change: Default (public_html)
To: [httpdocs]
Account Plans
One may customise them to match previous Plesk hosting “plans”, however this is not mandatory.
Virtual website creation – Admin username
The only requirement in this process is to create the Administration username as a “Custom username” giving it the domain.tld name (i.e. mydomain.com). This way the websites paths will end up being: /home/domain.tld, which makes it easier to do a path change from /var/www/vhosts to /home wherever there are scripts configurations containing full paths.
Perl
I am a perl script writer thus I use perl extensively, over the years I have created scripts that require a few additional modules. I shall not go into details with them (yet), however there’s an important bit I must mention, some perl scripts I use have a different #!. Some point to the sometimes non-existent /usr/local/bin/perl, so in order to avoid these script throwing an error I simply link it to the whereis perl (usally /usr/bin/perl or /bin/perl):
ln -s /usr/bin/perl /usr/local/bin/perl
Website content transfer
To transfer website content from Plesk to VM it is a matter of rsyncing each website with the rsync command, to minimise the load, the following commands are run at nice 20 from the source server, note that the target server must have the virtual server already configured prior to doing this, otherwise an error will be thrown:
port is the ssh port (if different than 22, which is recommended for security)
domain is the domain to be transferred
target is is the target server IP or domain
Depending on the size of the website this might take some time. Note that I am not really needing to transfer statistical information over. most if not all the required files are under httpdocs and cgi-bin in my case.
After the transfer, on the target server, ownership of the directories must be set:
username is the owner of the httpd and cgi-bin content (in my case I created a username matching the domain, making it easier to find the correct directory under /home when working over the CLI.
domain is the domain
Email content transfer
The operation of transferring emails to the target server are pretty much the same as website transfer, with a couple of exceptions.
IMAP changes (At client level, here using Thunderbird)
Server name: no change
Username: replace @ with .
Connection security: from SSL/TLS to STARTTLS
Authentication method: from encrypted password to normal password
SMTP changes (At client level, here using Thunderbird)
Server name: no change
Port from 25 to 587
Connection security: from SSL/TLS to STARTTLS
Authentication method: from encrypted password to normal password
Username: replace @ with .
Target server (after rsyncing all the dbs dumps on it)
VM Menu > Edit Databases > (manage current database usually called {domain}_{tld}) or create a new one if required.
click Manage …
Click Execute SQL
Run SQL from file Tab
From local file (browse to file)
Click Execute
Special characters
Sites with accents (like French’s)
The charset must be edited in the following Module:
Select Domain > Menu > Services > Configure Website > Languages > Character set for documents (x) iso-8859-1
In this series of Best Practice articles I talk about migrating websites and emails from a Plesk 11 run server to a Virtualmin run server. It describes in details the steps involved, including the eventual pitfalls and other thing I came across whilst doing it. Note that this documentation is addressed to people with medium expertise in linux/system administration.
Fed up with Plesk?
Since 2003 I have been using two brands of Dedicated Servers Control Panels: Ensim (RIP) and Plesk. So it’s died 🙁 oh well, Ensim was an awful CP, never liked it, I liked Plesk (from 8 to 11) a bit more and it has been my selected Control Panel for many years. However the time has come to make way for a relatively new comer: Virtualmin or VM for short, a very mature and simpler CP indeed with a vibrant Community.
Deciding to select another Control Panel is a big decision, especially when your bottom line is at stake, so after having extensively tested and used VM for the last few months I finally decided to make the move, VM is slick, simple and easy to use, it’s like Ronseal, it does what it says on the tin.
In this series of best practice articles I talk about migrating websites and emails from a Plesk 11 managed server to a Virtualmin managed server. It describes in some details the steps involved in doing it remedy the pitfalls and other things I came across whilst doing it. Note that this documentation is address to people with medium expertise in linux/system administration.
I got a vps with virtualmin installed, I recently upgraded clam antivirus using webmin/virtualmin, this resulted in the clamd failing to start.
After some research it turns out that I am running clamd with user clam instead of clamav. Yet yum upgrades clam with the user clamav and other directories in the configuration;
When no virtual websites are in existence, The Apache web server will point to /var/www/html and /var/www/cgi-bin in a base install of Virtualmin (the default). However when a Virtual website is created, this changes to the first available virtual site, so for example, if the hostname is some.domain.com and no virtual sites are configured, typing this URL in a browser will serve the content in /var/www/html. If a virtual site called virtualsite.com is created, the same request will serve the content of /home/virtualsite/public_html.
By design this is normal
Whilst this is the way Apache is designed and there’s nothing wrong with that, it becomes a problem when some applications are only available outside the virtual server realm (i.e. not suexec’ed). For example the server has Nagios or Munin installed and you want to be able to access it even after a virtual server has been created. The solution is to manually create the first virtual server and call it the same as the server hostname (some.domain.com).
Click “Save” then “Apply Changes” (on the top right hand side of the “Virtual Server Options” page). Checking your virtual website will show the index.shtml page.
To make it a default configuration
In order to enable this for all further virtual websites:
Fed up with Plesk?