Buggy Restore Operation

[hicom]

We've done recently a rebuild of a FreeBSD 6.1 i386 server using the latest 10.9-S58 . I'm listing these bugs here in sincere hope cPanel will address these problems seriously.

We found the following bugs in the restore process from cPanel backups:

1) If using the Incremental Backup method, no system information files are made. Under the GZIP method, there is a folder inside /backup/cpbackup/daily/dirs which contains important account files, that folder is empty under Incremental backup.

2) Dedicated IP Addresses are not restored automatically. When the option "Assign Dedicated IP" is selected, cPanel assigns arbitrary IP which is not the same as the old IP address that was assigned to the domain

2) Packages and Features do not show after the restore. Each account is assigned the proper package limits, however, these packages do not show in WHM packages section.

3) SSL Certificates were not installed Automatically, we had to go manually to each site we know that has an SSL certificate, unzip the backup, go to the /sslkeys/ folder and retrieve the .cert and .key

4) Cron Jobs were not restored at all and they are not present in the backups either.

5) ** VERY IMPORTANT ** Some Email Forwarders were not restored back. I couldn't find a logical reason why some accounts had forwarders restored while others did not.

6) ** VERY IMPORTANT 2 ** The DNS zones are not restored back either. cPanel creates the subdomains....etc, but if a DNS zone was modified through WHM, it losses all the changes made. I think the best way to work around this is to overwrite *.db files in the last step of the restore process.

7) MailMan lists emails were bouncing back until we ran /scripts/fixmailman , maybe the restore process should automatically run that script to fix any potential mailman issues.


Except for these 7 points, the restoration process went smoothly even with accounts as large as 5GB in size.

[Miss Jacky]

5) ** VERY IMPORTANT ** Some Email Forwarders were not restored back. I couldn't find a logical reason why some accounts had forwarders restored while others did not.

This might be due to wrong group settings in /etc/valiases, where a valiases file has the account's username as group instead of 'mail'.
chgrp mail /etc/valiases/* before moving the account can do the trick, although /scripts/fixvaliases somewhat does the same.

[ncrossland]

I recently had a similar experience -- particularly with points 3 and 6, which it was very annoying to find all the files in the backup, but they were not restored. Had to spend an afternoon recreating them all :-(

[ANewDay]

Is there a log of the restore process? I'm not sure if the disk has enough space for it to restore everything.

[brianoz]

cpanel doesn't do support from here; if you want them to fix bugs, submit them to their bug tracking system.