Rebuilding mail-in-a-box server

1

Hi,
I was messing around with ownCloud the other day and seem to have broken it–it says “File not found” when i go to the /cloud page. I host two domains on this address and am wondering what i must do regarding SSL certificates and email backups if i were to re-create the VM.

Thanks in advance, this project is pretty great!
Dan.

2

MIAB is supposed to be idempotent – it should set back up correctly if you re-run “mailinabox” on the server. Depending on how screwed up it is, that may not work. Have you tried it?

3

I’ve tried running

sudo mailinabox

on the server, everything seems to update fine although i still cant access my /cloud page.

4

I just went through this myself recently, and it turned out the fix was pretty simple (technically speaking).

  1. Stop the mailinabox on broken service

  2. Spin up a new server with the default config and perform required updates.

  3. Stop the mailinabox service on new server

  4. Tar up the /home/user-data folder, ensuring you use the -p flag for permissions, and move the data to the new server where you will untar it again ensuring you maintain permissions (root required). Move untared files to the /home/user-data folder on the new server.

  5. Swap around IP addresses if required to new server

  6. Reboot server.

This will give you a clean server with your old server data and config. All the data you need is contained in the /home/user-data folder. Now, understand I am running mine on the Amazon EC2 cloud, so it was easy for me to spin up a new server to do this and swap around the static ip I had assigned.

In the end this should ensure you have a clean build. Hope this helps.

1 Like
5

You can probably ‘fake’ this without a second server by removing /home/user-data, /usr/local/*, and /etc/mailinabox.conf.

I’d actually do something like move /home/user-data and /etc/mailinabox.conf temporarily to /root. I’ve not tried this though and my usual testing VM is currently in use, otherwise I’d test for you.

6

I tried something similar initially to clean up the mess I had made, the issue is that the installer script would still see the existing packages and not reinstall them or clean up the mess. Add to that the fact that I knew I had tweaked a few things outside the norm, I decided a clean install was best.