Skip to main content

Restoring OTRS on an Ubuntu Server

Some time ago I relocated our OTRS server from a failing server to a virtual machine under Microsoft Hyper-V. While the change to a virtual machine ran smoothly and I used the details in a previous post to set it up, after a month I noticed some strange errors creeping in to the installation - the nightly log emails had inconsistencies in them. Fortunately I was able to run a full backup of the OTRS installation using the built in backup tool and very shortly thereafter the server fell in a heap. Rebooting it caused a complete failure of the virtual disk. Now, how the hell something like that happens is beyond me. It was like the virtual disk dropped a head or something.... Ridiculous I know, but the fsck I ran basically told me the disk had failed and corruptions crept in to everything on the disk. Realising that I was fighting a bad fight, I decided to create a new virtual machine and transfer the data back across.

The recovery procedure, described here: http://doc.otrs.org/3.0/en/html/restore.html doesn't really cover everything that needs to happen. Here is a short breakdown of the notes that I made while I was running the recovery process:


  • make sure you set the MySQL (or whatever database you use) password to be the same.
  • in fact, make sure you match up all the passwords where possible.
  • Install OTRS first using the Ubuntu install method - which is well described here: http://wiki.otrs.org/index.php?title=Installation_on_Ubuntu_Lucid_Lynx_(10.4) 
    • make sure you run all the right commands, including the cron ones (which I initially forgot - oops!)
  • Run the restore as per the link above and then restart apache and cron.
  • Test your installation and see how it goes.
Since this error, I've written a very simple script that runs the backup and scp's it across to another server I have. This in turn is backed up to my FreeNAS box, hopefully protecting my useful data. Here is the script:

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
#!/bin/bash
NOW=$(date +"%Y-%m-%d_%H-%M")
/opt/otrs/scripts/backup.pl -d /home/user/backup
scp -r /home/user/backup/$NOW user@server:/home/user/backup/OTRS/
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The $NOW variable is configured to match the output of the OTRS backup.pl script and then I simply scp it across to my server. It's date organised and works pretty nicely. rsync might be a nicer way to do it, but this virtual machine only provides OTRS and nothing else so I'll keep it simple. 

If you can use any of this then please do.

AB out.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Plone - the open source Content Management System - a review

One of my clients, a non-profit, has a lot of files on it's clients. They need a way to digitally store these files, securely and with availability for certain people. They also need these files to expire and be deleted after a given length of time - usually about 7 years. These were the parameters I was given to search for a Document Management System (DMS) or more commonly a Content Management System (CMS). There are quite a lot of them, but most are designed for front facing information delivery - that is, to write something, put it up for review, have it reviewed and then published. We do not want this data published ever - and some CMS's make that a bit tricky to manage. So at the end of the day, I looked into several CMS systems that looked like they could be useful. The first one to be reviewed was OpenKM ( www.openkm.com ). It looked OK, was open source which is preferable and seemed to have solid security and publishing options. Backing up the database and upgradin

Musings on System Administration

I was reading an article discussing forensic preparation for computer systems. Some of the stuff in there I knew the general theory of, but not the specifics of how to perform. As I thought about it, it occurred to me that Systems Administration is such a vast field. There is no way I can know all of this stuff. I made a list of the software and operating systems I currently manage. They include: - Windows Server 2003, Standard and Enterprise - Exchange 2003 - Windows XP - Windows Vista - Windows 2000 - Ubuntu Linux - OpenSuSE Linux - Mac OSX (10.3 and 10.4) - Solaris 8 - SQL 2005 - Various specialised software for the transport industry I have specific knowledge on some of this, broad knowledge on all of it, and always think "There's so much I *don't* know". It gets a bit down heartening sometimes. For one thing - I have no clue about SQL 2005 and I need to make it work with another bit of software. All complicated and nothing straightforward. Irritating doesn&

elementary OS 5.1 Hera - a review and a revisit

 It's been ages since I used a desktop Linux distribution - being up to my ears in the horror of implementing ISO 27001 doesn't leave you much time to play around with computers - too busy writing policies, auditing and generally trying to improve security to a formally acceptable and risk managed level. I need a quick, small OS though to do the occasional network scan, view the contents of a dodgy file on and for general, low impact activities. I remembered reviewing elementary OS ( elementary.io ) some time ago ( see  https://www.ryv.id.au/2015/01/elementary-os-review.html ) from 2015 so I thought it was worth a revisit.  I downloaded the ISO from their website, forgoing to donation for the moment while I review it. If it turns out I'm going to keep using it, I'll send them some love. The ISO is 1.38GB in size and I booted it in a VMware Player instance. From go to whoa (I won't include the install photos here) it took about 10 minutes with a dual vCPU and 4GB of