How to go about migrating from ISPConfig 2 to 3

[bswinnerton]

Hey everyone,

I'm thinking more and more about creating a new virtual machine for ISPConfig 3. Right now I'm running ESXi on my server and have ISPconfig 2 installed on it with around 10-15 domains and 20-30 email accounts.

How should I go about migrating from ISPconfig 2 to 3, while maintaining all of the user accounts, passwords and emails and domains?

I don't really mind manually re-entering things like domains and DNS info, but the thing that I definitely cannot lose from the old server is the email addresses, emails and their passwords (simply because I cannot manually re-create them).

Thanks

[jerume]

I will be very interested in an answer too

[damir]

I'm afraid that you are left with the manual moving of the files. Ispc2 and 3 are not compatible because they are two totally different systems.

You need to re-create all the users and emails but both ispc 2 and 3 are using Courier so it is possible to move emails between servers.

I'm in process to migrate one of my iscp2 servers to ispc3 and alot of stuff needs to be re-created but the data can be moved between servers.

[jerume]

and what about the passwords ?

[damir]

Passwords need to be re-created as well because ispc3 uses virtualusers that are not stored and treated as unix users. They are all stored in database.

[bswinnerton]

Can we somehow use the /etc/shadow or /etc/passwd file to recreate the passwords?

[till]

The passwords in ispconfig 2 AND 3 use the same encryption method. This means that you can copy them from the /etc/passwd file to the password field in the mail_user, ftp_user and shell_user table without having to know them in cleartext nor having to recreate them.

Regarding the email accounts, in ispconfig 3, there is no separate username for email accounts as the email address itself is the username, this means that after you recreated the email mailboxes, you will have to tell your users that the new username is the email address and the password will remain the same if you copy it as explained above.

When it comes to the mailbox contnst, ispconfig 2 and 3 use both courier with maildir format, so you can copy the content of the maildir directories to the the new server. Just make sure that all maildirs in ispconfig 3 are owned by user and group vmail instead ofy a individual system user, so just chown them after you copied the files.

[bswinnerton]

Thanks Till,

What should the permissions look like on the web side? www-data owner?

Also, what are the main folders I should be bringing over? Anything besides /var/www/web*

[till]

The files inside the website directory (the "web" subdirectory created by ispconfig 3) should have the same owner then the "web" directory itself.

Also, what are the main folders I should be bringing over? Anything besides /var/www/web*

You can not bring over any main folders as the folder structure between ispconfig 2 and 3 is different. Also do not copy over the content of /var/www/web* as they are not compatibe, you can only copy over /var/www/web*/web/ to the /var/www/domain.com/web/ folder on the new server. and then after you created the email mailboxes, you can copy the content of e.g. /var/www/web*/users/user1/Maildir/* to /var/vmail/domain.com/user/

[bswinnerton]

Thanks once again Till!

If it weren't for you guys, I wouldn't even have a server