I broke my setup

[akulbe]

MIAB has worked great for 7+ years. I tried to get my VPS provider to preserve an IP for a new machine, so I could upgrade 18 => 22, and they told me they couldn’t (wouldn’t?).

I ended up fiddling with sources.list, and putting the stock config back in, instead of the hosting-provided one, and I stepped the upgrades up 18.04.6 => 20.04.6 => 22.04.3

I know this is unsupported, but I was trying to preserve my IP and I figured this was the only way.

/home/user-data still exists, but my attempts to upgrade MIAB have failed. Is there any way to redo the install and reimport the old emails?

Thanks.

[gezza]

Hello

Forgive me for asking but why would your IP address change if your just upgrading or am I missing something here?

Cheers

[akulbe]

MIAB says they don’t support in-place upgrades of the distro, last time I read up on it.

You have to deploy a new instance. Deploying a new instance won’t preserve the IP because the provider won’t do it. Once you deploy new, it’s a different IP.

So I did the in-place upgrade of the distro, and I was hoping to be able to upgrade MIAB and have things work… but no dice.

[andrew]

There was someone on the forums who did the upgrade-in-place, but from memory it wasn’t trivial. It would be much easier and cleaner to start with a refresh 22.

Do you need to keep the old instance? If your backups are elsewhere and you can be offline for a while, why not put a fresh copy of 22 onto your existing instance, and install & restore from there. You’ll be offline during the install, but that won’t take long. (Check your backups.)

If you need to keep the old instance, make a fresh instance, install, restore the mailboxes, and update your DNS glue records accordingly. You’ll only be offline for as long as it takes for the DNS to catch up with your address change.

[matidau]

Agree with you that following the official way would be the best. But to save people time searching the forums…

This is someone who had done an in place upgrade that had errors with an upgrade:

Error with V62 upgrade

Thank you matidau, your suggestion worked for me as well! I upgraded to 60.1/Ubuntu 22 “in-place” following the directions by mouse on the upgrade thread. Perhaps this is arising from that? Anyway, I appreciate your help!

And I think this is the post they are referring to:

Version 60 for Ubuntu 22.04 is released

Just wanted to add another confirmation, in place upgrade worked, had to run LTS upgrade twice to get to 22.04 and the above operation mentioned by Wherewolf before running setup script and it all went smoothly. Didn’t have to restore backup with duplicity or anything. Full operation I performed # backed up as mentioned in box migration instructions just incase curl -s https://mailinabox.email/setup.sh | sudo bash sudo apt update sudo apt upgrade reboot sudo nano /etc/update-manager/release…

Just to reiterate the warning for others, you may be on your own if this path is followed.

[tkforbes]

I made a suggestion on another, older thread that used a temporary MIAB while you reimage the VPS at your original IP. Then you migrate back to the original IP. The post is here…

MAIB Vs M365, FastMail, etc?

Assuming you have a bit of extra time, there is a method to retain your DO IP address. Spin up a new DO Droplet for a few hours and migrate your MIAB to it. Update your DNS to point (temporarily) to that new Droplet. Set reverse DNS. Ensure everything is working properly. Reimage your old Droplet and install the current MIAB version. Migrate from your temporary Droplet to your original Droplet. Set reverse DNS. Update your DNS again. Destroy the temporary Droplet. DO charges by the hour, so t…

[alento]

@akulbe

/home/user-data still exists, but my attempts to upgrade MIAB have failed. Is there any way to redo the install and reimport the old emails?

What is your current status on this, and what is the status of your backup? Since it has been 4 days, I suspect that you may have already moved forward…

[akulbe]

No, I’m still stuck.

[alento]

Ok, so what exactly is the current status? What are you working with? What functions, what doesn’t?

Who is your provider? If they are unwilling to transfer the IP, you may have to be resigned to losing it and starting anew. I suspect that your existing data is much more the concern.

Do you have discord? The MiaB Slack is hopelessly broken (for me at least) but communicating in chat will be simpler than via forum.

[tyler]

I did the 18.04 > 20.04 > 22.04.3 in-place upgrade. I followed this fantastic comment: Version 60 for Ubuntu 22.04 is released - #46 by mouse

In addition, I had to manually remove the blinker 1.4 Python package that came with the upgrade.

sudo rm /usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/blinker-1.4.egg-info
sudo rm -rf /usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/blinker

If you can share what errors you’re encountering, we can probably help.