Category: Work/Technical

One of the chaps that hosts his files with us, encountered a strange problem with his email. First off, two email account he had created in cpanel had dissapeared. He could connect to them in outlook, but no mail could be sent to them. He also described how he could not create any mail accounts either.

He mentioned an error, and upon closer inspection i too experienced the error.

Add a New Email Account
There was a problem creating the email account.
Permission denied: /home/*insertusername*/etc/something passwd passwd

I tried creating mail accounts on one of our websites on that server, and they worked fine. So the problem was apparently only with his account.

I did a few google searches, and nothing really came up. I tweaked what i was searching for and stumbled upon a forum that shed some light on my situation. A chap on there spoke of this problem and someone told him the following fix;

Ask tech support to go into home directory of the account by logging into server as root and fire command
chown username.mail etc -R
It will fix the issue.

I tried it with andys account, and bingo. Another example of how a techies best friend really is the internet.

Well, the copy seems to be going ok. After my previous issues that were due to the disk space being maxxd out, i decided to watch this account copy with great detail.

I noticed that the disk space was running out again, as it was extracting the contents of the huge tar file with the maxd account in it. It just managed it, and got past the “Generating account” part which is further than its gone before.

It then did some other shit, changing IP addresses in config files, and then it moved onto something that said “Restoring files” – but wait a sec? I thought you’d alreadyextracted the files?

Anyway, the disk space was running out fast, so i removed the tar file that contained a copy of all the files that had been brought over, as i had already seen it extract everything.. so technically this file is now useless.

So far so good.. But it is slowley running out of room again. This is the final stage, and once this is done i can finally set the nameservers of the final domain to cross over, and i can be rid of my third server!

It has worked.

Praise JEEBUS!

I am now down to 14gig empty hard drive space on my server that was about to burst only a monent ago. All the temp files that were used to move the site over came to FOURTEEN GIGABYTES! That is literally twice the size of the account!

So the lesson here, is make sure you have SHIT loads of space on both servers if your moving a website from one server to another using WHM, if you dont have at least double the size of your account free on every server involved in the migration, then you might as well not bother.

Peace.

Im gonna chill out.

Ok, so this is a bit of a nerdy blog post..

Me and dave have a couple of servers that we run, one for our clients and one for our maxxd stuff. Well anyway, fairly recently i moved the maxxd stuff from a shared hosting package from a popular webhost, to a new Virtual Dedicated Server of its own. Unfortunately, i made the mistake of using nameservers i had used once ages ago, they were ns2 & ns3.maxxd.org. Now i have read and been told that there shouldn’t be an issue here, but i have had nothing but problems with it.

I belive that somewhere there are cached IP addresses pointing to the old server i had months ago, and with some ISP’s people were having to refresh the page 10 times before anything would load up, even i had issues accessing the site, and there was nothing apart from some random IP addresses coming up in DNS reports that was obviously wrong.

I felt the only option was to, once again, move servers. Start a fresh with a new domain name i had never used as the main nameserver domain, nicely updated system to copy the accounts over for HOPEFULLY the last time.

So, i started copying the accounts over using WHM’s built in account copying option, i did bulk lots of 4 or 5 and most of them went without a hitch, once they were over i switched the NS and a few hours later they were up and running on my new server.

In fact, every account went without a hitch, apart from one.

The Maxxd.com account.

I kept getting this error.

Sorry, the copy failed. Unable to find the cpanel user file. Is the archive missing (cwd: xxx/xxx/xxx/xxx)?
Account Restore Failed…

Obviously i removed the name of the file, but you get the gist. I did a bit of a google search for it, with a few adjustments every so often to widen my search, i stumbled upon a forum where a few people had experienced the same issue, and one chap commented that he had seen this happen before, on servers where the HDD was maxxd out while creating the archive used to move the files from one server, to the other.

I tried the copy again, but this time watching the hard drive usage, and noticed it crept up slowly, and sure enough it went to 100% and it hadn’t finished making the archive. I connected to the server after the copy had failed, and pruned the server of all crap, old accounts that had already been copied over to the new server successfully, until i was left with ONE account, the main maxxd one, that is ONE site on a server with 20gig hard drive space and shit..

Tried the copy again, and…

It failed… again!

So now im sat here after upgrading BOTH servers to 30gig hard drives, trying to copy one site over so that i can cancel my old server. I had to UPGRADE it before i could cancel it..

Work that one out!

Hopefully this will be the last time ill have to look at this god damm copy account screen, as i would say i have probably seen this screen more times this week than ive seen my girlfriend.. I hate moving servers!!!

But i would probably bet that Maxxd.com is one of the highest “moved from server to server” website in existance! It has to be, im sure its on its tenth server. I must be.

Anyway, off to sit and watch paint dry.. well. i’ll be watching this account copying.. tarballs and archives.. n’ shit 🙂