What's coming in Cloudron 9.0 (was 8.0)

[girish]

Just finished up on the "Dry run" feature for Cloudron restore. You can use this to test your backups, test migrate to another server to see how well the server performs (for example, when you switch VPS) etc.

The way it works is :

• you select this "Dry run" checkbox. When enabled, it will restore as always except it won't update the DNS.

  

• Before you click 'Restore', add an entry in /etc/hosts for my.domain.com to this new server's IP. You probably also want to add entries for your app domains if you want to test them.

• Once restored, and you feel happy, you can "switch over" to this new server, using the new sync DNS feature. This is in the Domains view.

  

[ruihildt]

That's great!

Will you potentially lose some data during the backup/restore time that won't be carried over to the new one if you're running "dynamic" apps (like a forum)?

[imc67]

@ruihildt I was thinking the same! For example emails getting in to the old server will be lost I guess.

[girish]

@ruihildt yes, any data generated between the switch over is lost.

[imc67]

@girish wouldn't it be a good idea to have something like a "pause switch" all it does is (don't know technically):

1. "freeze" all the containers,
2. then make a backup,
3. migrate to new server,
4. do some testing and
5. switch DNS
6. finally "un-freeze / un-pause" all the containers on the new server (leaving the old one freezed)

Between 1 and 6 you can show the now already available and customizable custom_pages and incoming mail is already buffered at the sender.

[d19dotca]

@imc67 This is easy to do manually in the meantime, but yes I agree it'd be awesome to have this process sort of automated. For me it's mostly just email I focus on that's likely to change between backup and restore, so I do a full system backup and once it gets to the "box" part of the backup I disable the mail container so that it won't receive mail after the backup. Helps a lot. Of course doing this if you have clients relying heavily on email like I do then it means you have to do this in the middle of the night though lol. The ability to automate this process would be awesome.

[girish]

@imc67 Ah yes, we used to call this "retire" back in the managed hosting days We used to show a page that the server is migrating. Incidentally, I just removed the retire script last night! It's really just systemctl stop docker box but of course these days you will see a "app is down page" instead of a better "migration in progress" page.

I have created https://git.cloudron.io/cloudron/box/-/issues/774 but it won't make it to this release.

[d19dotca]

I installed and ran 6.2 this evening. So far it's looking great. Loving the changes and improvements. Especially happy with the 'missing backup' cleanup task So far so good! Thanks for all the hard work you guys!

---

One word of caution for anyone who hasn't upgraded to 6.2 (pre-release) yet... the downtime experienced during this upgrade was significantly higher than normal. Usually upgrades of Cloudron have practically no noticeable downtime or if it does it's only for a couple of minutes, but this time the upgrade took around 20-25 minutes before everything was running again which I'm sure (based on the logs) was because of the major version changes for MySQL, Postgres, Redis, etc. So just be prepared for a larger downtime during this upgrade.

---

Edit: I may have spoken too soon with regards to backups... running into two different issues with it now after upgrade to 6.2.

[girish]

I can confirm the bug. Those on OVH object storage for backups should not update to 6.2. Note that only the backup entries in the local database are removed, the backups itself are intact in OVH Storage. However, this means that Cloudron won't "clean up" the backups in remote storage properly since it has lost track of them.

Fix is coming in 6.2.1.

[humptydumpty]

@girish I closed the upgrade notification by mistake. What's the changelog for v6.2.1?

Edit: Nevermind! I found it in the "Event Log".

    "version": "6.2.1",
    "changelog": [
      "ovh: object storage URL has changed from s3 to storage subdomain",
      "ionos: add profit bricks object storage",
      "update node to 14.15.4",
      "update docker to 20.10.3",
      "new base image 3.0.0",
      "postgresql updated to 12.5",
      "redis updated to 5.0.7",
      "dovecot updated to 2.3.7",
      "proxyAuth: fix docker UA detection",
      "registry config: add UI to disable it",
      "update solr to 8.8.1",
      "firewall: fix issue where script errored when having more than 15 wl/bl ports",
      "If groups are used, do not allow app installation without choosing the access settings",
      "tls addon",
      "Do not overwrite existing DMARC record",
      "Sync dns records",
      "Dry run restore",
      "linode: show cloudron is installing when user SSHs",
      "mysql: disable bin logs",
      "Show cancel task button if task is still running after 2 minutes",
      "filemanager: fix various bugs involving file names with spaces",
      "Change Referrer-policy default to 'same-origin'",
      "rsync: preserve and restore symlinks",
      "Clean up backups function now removes missing backups",
      "Avoid updown notifications on full restore",
      "Add retries to downloader logic in installer"

[A Former User]

@p44 Multihost support sounds amazing. It'll make Cloudron unstoppable I think.

[p44]

@af

@A Former User said in What's coming in Cloudron 7.0:

@p44 Multihost support sounds amazing. It'll make Cloudron unstoppable I think.

Totally agree on this point!! I'm sure Cloudron team will do an amazing work!

[girish]

We started rolling out 6.2 over the last week, I think it will take until mid next week for the full roll out. As a heads up, there are two known regressions:

• Renew all certs button does not work in the Domains view.
• Linode Object Storage backups does not work . Trying to work out a fix upstream - https://github.com/aws/aws-sdk-js/issues/3404

[humptydumpty]

@girish I was about to post a "bug" about certs. One of my domains failed to renew 13 hours ago. I received an email from my CR about it.

{   "domain": "www.mydomain.com",   "errorMessage": "Unexpected status: invalid" }

I checked the logs and here's the timeline.
13 hours ago - certificate renewal failed
12 hours ago - certificate renewal succeeded
1 hour ago - certificate renewal succeeded (it ran it again?)

{
  "domain": "mydomain.com",
  "errorMessage": ""
}

Checking the cert on the site itself, shows that it did renew it successfully.

Edit: BTW, this is the same domain that I receive random messages saying that DKIM records aren't set properly but I know they are. The message comes back up a few days later. DNS manually controlled for this domain in CR.

[girish]

We will make another pit stop at Cloudron 6.3 before Cloudron 7 - https://forum.cloudron.io/topic/4723/what-s-coming-in-cloudron-6-3

[mdreira]

I know you already have a lot of work, but if the ability to have alias domains could be added to this version, it would be incredible!!!!

I am needing it.

[avatar1024]

I wonder if there any scope for implementing the restic backend for backups in cloudron 8.0?
See this thread https://forum.cloudron.io/topic/1575/backup-improvements-restic-backend

[mdreira]

I wanted to ask something about multihosting in relation to Cloudron licenses.

I will give you an example: the main server has a Cloudron premium license. Two more servers have a free Cloudron license.

Could I control the applications on the free servers from the main server? Domains, apps, backups, emails...

[girish]

I wonder how valid/relevant this post is now, since it's like a year old And all the features except multi-host are now implemented.

[avatar1024]

@girish true that it's pretty hard for this post to keep up with your coding speed

Maybe we should start a new clean one and you can let us know what you think on some of the newer ideas that were proposed (e.g. this one on my side)

Well done for you amazing work! (and the friendly support I have to say!)