Guide / Steps to Disaster Recovery of Nethserver with a Dokuwiki and Zabbix installation

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Hi everyone, recently I needed to move my Nethserver to a new instance. To make a long story short, I assigned too much space to my original installation and wanted to shrink the drive down which is not possible because of the XFS Filesystem. The only way to do this was to backup the original server and bring everything over to a new instance. Of course I experienced issues a long the way. This is why I am sharing the steps of what I did to get that done. My hope is that, if any of you are faced with issues that this small guide can help you.

  1. Backup your original server by doing a Configuration Backup and a Data Backup. Make sure you download your Configuration Backup. For the Data Backup, you will need a place to store it. In my case, I’m placing everything in my NAS.

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  1. If you are running it in a hypervisor (something like proxmox), backup your Nethserver VM. Otherwise, if you are running bare metal, you could use Clonezilla to backup the disk where you installed Nethserver.
  2. Shutdown your Nethserver VM
  3. Install a fresh copy of Nethserver
  4. Once Nethserver is installed, you will need to define your FQDN, you can give it the same FQDN you had before, either way with the restore it will override it.
  5. Go to your terminal, run ‘yum update’
  6. If you have applications installed from other repos such as Dokuwiki and / or Zabbix, make sure you install them.
  7. In my case I had Dokuwiki and Zabbix installed and I needed to install the repo for Zabbix and on top of that install Dokuwiki and Zabbix as per the procedures available. Dokuwiki : https://wiki.nethserver.org/doku.php?id=module:dokuwiki, Zabbix : https://wiki.nethserver.org/doku.php?id=zabbix
  8. Then you can proceed to restore your saved Configuration Backup from step 1. This will temporarily disconnect you and will restore to your previously assigned IP address. It is possible you will need to clear your cookies in order to connect again (I had to).
  9. Restore your Data Backup.
  10. You are backup and running!

The only problem I’ve noticed is the following : Even if my certs were restored, I got an invalid certificate error from the browser. I had to reinstall my let’s encrypt certificates. If you are using a DNS-01 certificate renewal, here is the procedure again in case you lost it : https://wiki.nethserver.org/doku.php?id=userguide:let_s_encrypt_for_internal_servers

6 Likes
2

Hi Patrick,

I think that with BackupPC, it will restore all without the need to intall nothing else on an updated fresh installed NethServer.

You can have a look at how I did it: https://www.micronator.org/affaires/produit/nethserver-101-cahier-11backuppc/
It is from august 2019 but should still works.

Michel-André

3

I tried that and it doesn’t work unfortunately. The steps I listed was the only way for me to get things working. I’ll try it again when I have time but, for now the procedure I listed was the only successful one for me. Thanks for sharing though. Like I often say, not all sizes fits all, depends on many variables at times.

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Hi Patick,

Like I often say: “You can bring a horse to your watering hole, but you cannot force it to drink.”

Michel-André

5

You may want to try this particular scenario :wink: