Cloudron Forum

@girish aftering giving both redis and the app a load more memory the import worked fine. I don't know why I didn't just try that before to be honest.

I'm not sure how it managed to half-work before so that the apps was running and the import seemed to have worked, but without the users, but I've just done the back import again and the users have re-appeared, so panic over. Phew.

Migration aside, maybe we should periodically check keys for validity and raise some notification 🤔

@girish said in Best practice for migrating apps from one Cloudron to another?:

Ah! I misread your issue then.

Yeah, I think you missed or misread this bit:

@jdaviescoates said in Best practice for migrating apps from one Cloudron to another?:

But the odd thing is that in the App Email settings on the old server it has always been and is still ghost.app

I can only guess that it was working there because I had set-up the required email addresses that are set in the portal settings in Ghost:

41999d97-12f0-41e3-b47b-b95114bcdca2-image.png

I guess when Cloudron couldn't find that mailbox on the new server it tried to just send as 'ghost.app' instead? 🤷

But yeah, as you say, would be good to somehow remind users this might need to be done too, like you say:

@girish said in Best practice for migrating apps from one Cloudron to another?:

Mmmm... I wonder how the user can be reminded of this. I think for a start having this in the doc page as a checklist (which is what this thread is about!) will help.

Agreed 🙂

But maybe whenever importing an app a pop-up could appear saying something like "you might also need to recreate mailboxes on this domain" or something? 🤷

I figured out the issue - posting here for anyone who encounters the same...
I had not whitelisted my new server's IP address with my registrar (Namecheap). Once I did this, installs and uninstalls are now working.

The error was actually an external error passed from Namecheap, not an internal Cloudron error message 🙂

@fbartels said in Backups and users:

Cloudron treats user names as unique

Yes, we used to uuid and then went and changed all the apps to use username so that migration from one Cloudron to another (or anywhere else) is easier. As long as the username exists on the other cloudron, user should be able to login.

@plains-digital yes, you can also restore app by app. https://docs.cloudron.io/backups/#import-app-backup . But obviously, restoring entire server via backup is far simpler.

I have not used VMWare tools extensively, but I think you can do the below

Take a full Cloudron backups before you do anything. I think the best approach is to simply use VMware snapshots. Snapshot the VM. Move/copy the snapshot to the end destination and create a new VM again from snapshot. Depending on your setup, maybe the move/copy is redundant. As I said, I don't really know much about the VMware tools. Change the IP address of the dashboard my.cloudron.example to the new IP manually. i.e via your DNS provider. Start the the new VM. You should be able to visit my.cloudron.example already and login Once you visit, go to Domains -> Sync DNS. This will resync all the DNS entries with the new IP automatically.

That should be it, I guess.

If something goes bad, please let us know here and you can always start up the old instance immediately and continue.

@luckow thanks for your input 🙂

@luckow said in Merging mulitple Cloudrons in to one big new one?:

why?

In part just so everything in one place and so I just have to manage, maintain, update etc one server instead of several servers.

But also because e.g.

I've got an instance of PeerTube on one of the smaller VPSs (it's bridport.tv so makes sense to have it on my.bridport.coop where I've got all the Bridport stuff), but I've realised that it really needs a lot more power than that server has.

I'd also like to give access to some of the apps of got on my.uniteddiversity.coop to all the people on my.bridport.coop - at present this would mean them creating another account and then not having the same credentials for both (although to be fair most of the apps currently on my.bridport.coop aren't LDAP enabled anyway, either because they don't have it - like Discourse - or because it doesn't really suit the use case - public instances of PeerTube, Mastodon, Pixelfed).

I think quite a few of the apps would likely benefit for the increased power the dedicated server would have.

The issues you've highlighted wouldn't be that big an issue for me because I think I'm currently the only person/ name who is on all of them so there aren't two Jane Does (but there would be if I started saying "sign-up over on my.uniteddiversity.coop so I can give you access to our shared x too".

The biggest issue would be getting the handful of people actively using some of the other Cloudrons over onto the One Big Cloudron, but currently the numbers of people I'm talking about would be manageable (but this gets harder as more people start joining the other secondary Cloudrons).

@jdaviescoates said in Server migration tips? Need same ubuntu version? Possible to do without downtime?:

I guess I could try:

add the ip of my old server to my /etc/hosts file on my laptop so I can access it again post DNS changes
boot up my old server and run a backup
Then try the restore email thing linked above by copying the relevant files from one server to the other (not sure how exactly I'd do that, I guess maybe with scp or something)

But I wonder if another option would be to

add the ip of my old server to my /etc/hosts file on my laptop so I can access it again post DNS changes
boot up my old server and run a backup
restore this new backup of the old server into the new server (although I guess this could now get messy - what would happen with emails that have since arrived on the new server).

I'd recommend the first option there to avoid overriding any emails on the new server which aren't on the old server. The first steps would be good because then you'd get a backup again you can follow the steps from the docs at that point to restore emails, essentially merging with the new server afterwards.

Definitely will be interested if @staff has any other recommendations though, will be good to know for future.

@eddowding said in Updating Cloudron to a stable version:

I was migrating servers when I noticed that I'm on 7.2.5, but the latest is 7.3.2.

When moving to the new server, you can install it as ./cloudron-setup --version 7.2.5 . 7.3 was out last week, just ironing out some regressions. We expect to start rolling it out next week.

yes, see e.g.

https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/moving/

Or this short guide published yesterday

https://codingitwrong.com/2022/10/10/migrating-a-mastodon-account.html

@humptydumpty Thank you, that has actually worked!

@samaneha Which app do you want to migrate? The backups have the database dump and the data files. What else do you need to migrate?

Backup/Restore process is actually better than a disk clone as it allows for one to remove the older cruft, upgrade the OS, switch hardware, etc.. yet all the Apps and Cloudron instance settings work as originally backed up.

Very handy and a seriously difficult thing to do, hence the many disk imaging and other schemes to try and replicate a nicely configured system, which quickly become out of date, being so static.

Cloudron FTW! 😄

@girish I think it was ultimately a disk space issue - I restarted unbound and that seemed to do the trick. I have to move servers again because of a Vultr restriction (block storage not in the zone I had the VM in) that's unrelated to Cloudron so I'll see what happens. Thanks guys!

@LeeW Thanks for trying it and letting us know!

thanks for proving my point that one cannot have a discussion with you 🙂

@timconsidine said in Moving Cloudron to new server : stop apps?:

that I didn't set the PTR record in the new VPS provider until I started the migration

I ran into exactly this problem the last time as well 😄

@atridad yeah, I just bumped the internal default for data directory migration to be 1GB . I tested with ~500GB now and it's all good.

@girish
Thanks for the info and all the work (support) you have done for me Girish 👍👍