Migration manager still broken in 9.3

[HostaHost]

I really can't imagine what is so utterly complex that after 9 months the migration manager in the 9.x series still doesn't work correctly. There's even a patch that was released for 9.2.x to fix the issues yet 9.3 gets released without the fixes in that patch for 9.2; how is that even possible?

May 12th 2009 was the first public report of the migration manager in 9.x breaking all the sites SSL certs on a given server each time it is used:

http://forum.parallels.com/showthread.php?t=90260

Seven months later a patch was released for some versions of 9.2:

http://forum.parallels.com/showpost.php?p=395046&postcount=39

A second issue which has not been discussed in the forums but which we made Parallels aware of back in September of last year via ticket 781567 is that the migration manager ruins all of the permissions of anything in the /private folder and makes all the directories and subdirectories not executable, so all must be fixed by root or recopied by hand via tar file to get them corrected.

Now 9.3 comes out and it appears the issue of resetting the SSL certs on all the sites on the server has been resolved, the permissions issue on /private is still broken, and now migration manager breaks the SSL configuration of the sites that are being migrated in a way that prevents the web server from restarting on the target machine. What appears to happen is the migration manager brings over the existing config file for a site, leaving the SSLCertificateFile set to whatever it had been on the old server instead of what it should be for the new server since evidently that unique name is not preserved. So what you end up with is apache not starting with this type of error:

Starting httpd: Syntax error on line 41 of /var/www/vhosts/domain.com/conf/httpd.include:
SSLCertificateFile: file '/usr/local/psa/var/certificates/cert-GpiNJu' does not exist or is empty
[FAILED]

To fix this you have to go to that site, set its certificate back to what it should be, turn SSL support back on and turn use same directory back on if you had it on before since migration manager fails to preserve any of those settings. Once you've done this, try to start apache back up. Oh, if you've migrated more than one site, then you're going to have to go into every single one and fix them all before apache will restart.

 

[IgorG]

I have forwarded your complaints to developers. I will update this thread with their answer as soon as I receive it.

 

[HostaHost]

Any update?

 

[IgorG]

Problem still under developer's investigation.

 

[nedry]

I'm running into this problem. Where is the fix?

Fedora 7 (Plesk 8.6) -> CentOS 5.4 (Plesk 9.3)

 

[Bevan]

[...]Starting httpd: Syntax error on line 41 of /var/www/vhosts/domain.com/conf/httpd.include:
SSLCertificateFile: file '/usr/local/psa/var/certificates/cert-GpiNJu' does not exist or is empty
[FAILED][...]

This problem is still present in Plesk 9.5.4. SSL Certificates are not migrated automatically. Is this still under investigation after 11 months? I have to migrate dozens of domains so this is very annoying...

 

[HostaHost]

They'll just tell you to upgrade to version 10, where the migration manager is all kinds of broken with missing email forwards and aliases, screwed up permissions in the copied directories, missing .htaccess files, etc. So you have the pick the version of plesk that is the least broken and then try to work around it.

 

[Michael MacDonald]

I am having all kinds of trouble with even getting a stable environment to test a migration. I am unable to restore my Plesk machine at all.

Just venting.

 

[Michael MacDonald]

I do have a question about migration manager. If I have a source server with IP addresses and I want to move them over with the migration, does the migrator do that? I am thinking I could shut down eth1 (I have eth0 on a private LAN) and the addresses would not conflict.

 

[HostaHost]

It doesn't. In fact, with Plesk 9 and up, it won't even let you migrate a site on an exclusive IP to a shared IP during the migration, so basically you have to add as many IP addresses as exclusive-ip sites you have to migrate to the destination server just to get the migration to even work, then if your plan was to move the ip's, now you can remove them from the old server, add them to the new server, switch all the site's to the correct ip's, remove the ones you only needed there for the migration, go back and set all the sites to be the default site for their respective ip address.

You can of course add the same IP's to both servers at the same time even if they're on the same network, your router will randomly chose which server's arp reply it honors, so traffic may randomly go to one server or the other mid-migration, but it's an option. Then remove the ip's off the old box once you're done, clear arp on the router, back in business.

Plesk 8 would at least let you move them all to a shared IP so you waste less time.

 

[Michael MacDonald]

Thank you....

That is more information about Migration Manager than I have gotten from anyone at Plesk.

Thanks.