Issue WARNING!! Don't migrate from 12.5 to onyx 17.5 - it's pain in the ***!!! Wasted time...

[andre.spindler]

I want to move data from a current plesk 12.5 on centos 6 to a new server with plesk 17.5 on centos 7.
On the current server I have web and mail together on one server, now I want to split.
For the moment I opnly want to migrate the mails from the old one to the new.

But migration fails. After selecting customers, subscriptions and hosting plans I receive the following message:
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Failed to convert clients and subscriptions
Cause: not well-formed (invalid token): line 107, column 34
That is a critical error, migration was stopped.
---
I have verified this as this told to be related to utf-8 chars in password fields (Migration fails: ParseError: not well-formed invalid token) - but there are none.
But strange: I only select mail data to be migrated. No Web space data, no db data.
Like told in the suggest link, I examine passwords. But there are no mail passwords included. But instead I see something about "port 3306" and "db-admin". WTF? I want to migrate mails no database data?

But plesk also provedes some detail information about the migration. So I open this link to get some more piece of information what makes the migration fail:
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Failed to check license limits on target Plesk server
Exception: 'NoneType' object has no attribute 'iter_all_subscriptions'
---
Ahh. No problem with passwords an invalid tokens. But with the license? Hää. Plesk is just kidding me.
Bullshjit software. Two error message with completely different mening, as the wrong tokens are told to be ccreated on the source server and have to be fixed by changing passwords but the licence problem occurs on the target server.

Seems I have to move every single piece of data and config by myself...
Perhaps I should ask to get employed by plesk as their products doen't work and waste a lot of life time...

 

[pleskpanel]

I feel your pain as far as upgrade processes in general are concerned, but it's important to consider that Plesk is working on top of already complex environments so glitches in the upgrade process can happen and your situation might just be one of those outliers which require more work versus a more widespread issue that is more quickly identified across a larger user base. Not trying to defending Plesk specifically but it's not always easy building a "one size fits all" with a user base that uses an incredible number of software variations. On that note, if it's something very unique/difficult to dig through it just might be worth it to buy a Plesk support ticket to save you the time with dealing with the problem or worse, manually moving large amounts of data/reconfiguration.

It looks like another unfortunate Pleskian ran across a similar scenario (https://talk.plesk.com/threads/plesk-migration-headaches.341941/) so see if that can help point you in the right direction.

Good luck andre.spindler!

 

[Aleksey Filatev]

Hello,

Thank you for feedback and detailed description of your case.

Unfortunately, migration of only mail accounts from one Plesk to another is not a common case, and it is not supported natively. By design, Plesk Migrator work as following:

• Dump structure of your hosting on the source server: all customers, their domains, databases, mail account, and much more.
• Suggest to select subscriptions (main domains) which you want to migrate.
• Suggest to exclude migration of files, content of your databases, and e-mails messages.
• After that Plesk Migrator will create the same hosting structure on the target server, as was on the source: the same domains in selected subscriptions with the same limits, the same databases (empty, w/o any tables), the same mailboxes (empty, w/o any e-mails), etc.
• Finally, Plesk Migrator starts to copy content of just created subscriptions: copy files (if not excluded), dump structure of databases on the source and then restore this dumps on the target (if not excluded), and sync content of mailboxes (if not excluded).

So, if you want to split your server and migrate only mail, you can exclude copying of files and database content, but anyway, structure of selected subscriptions will be dumped on the source and will be fully created on the target, w/o files, with empty databases, etc. You can remove all extra data after migration.

An issue "not well-formed invalid token" occurs in case if data on the source server is corrupted. To found the root cause you need to investigate log of dump agent - an applications which dumps data on the source server. such logs could be found in session directory, named like "/usr/local/psa/var/modules/panel-migrator/sessions/YYYYMMDDHHIISS/".

We will be glad to help you with investigation of the problem: will find the root cause and provide a solution. You can create a support request or just provide me credentials to your target Plesk server via private conversation.

 

[pleskpanel]

Speaking of which, there was an update on this at https://talk.plesk.com/threads/plesk-migration-headaches.341941/#post-827901 but you noted that you already worked through the steps in the KB.

There's no question that dealing with migration is a headache to say the least but it sounds like Aleksey's offer to PM him above could be the fastest and smoothest way to a resolution.