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Migrating Nextcloud to a new server

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It was a particularly sunny day, both in the real world and in the world of IT.

There was no cause for alarm, no foreshadowing of pending doom. Yet, it

happened. For reasons that I will not get into, there is a way (perhaps by

overzealous children playing in the bathtub, or not properly sealed plumbing

air vents, or something along that line – not trying to place any blame) that a

huge torrential downpour of water will come through the sheetrock in the

ceiling of the room housing my server, and there is a way that all of that

water can get dumped right into the server itself, since it is on the top shelf

and closest to the water. Either way, servers don’t run that well when they are

full of water, and a Dell PowerEdge 1950 just isn’t waterproof.

After drying it out, I was able to get it to boot again. It sometimes would

work, sometime not. At times it would run like a champ, and others it would

give up and quit. The only consistent thing was the internal fan speeds were

now set to maximum, because the speed sensor didn’t work for them anymore. So,

it was time to get a new server.

A very good and generous buddy of mine donated a Dell PowerEdge R520 to me,

completely free of charge, with dual Xeon 2.4GHz processors, 32GB of RAM, and

over 4TB of disk storage. It was a gold mine indeed! He felt it was old, but

compared to the PowerEdge 1950 I was running, this was a real powerhouse and a

great gift!

Now I just had to put it to work.

First order of business was moving my Nextcloud instance from the old server to

the new. That shouldn’t be too hard, since Nextcloud_made_a_straightforward_six

step_write-up_on_how_to_do_just_that. Unfortunately, it didn’t work when I

tried it.

So, per step 1, I installed my preferred OS, in this case Ubuntu 20.04 onto the

R520, and proceeded to follow my own write-up for installing LAMP, and followed

the new_install_guide_for_Nextcloud to make sure I properly installed PHP and

setup the MariaDB. Set up Apache2 web server with all my Let’s encrypt certs,

etc. All seemed to be going well here.

Step 2 was to activate maintenance mode on your old Nextcloud instance, so on

the 1950, I edited the nextcloud/config/config.php file and changed the line

with ‘maintenance‘ from false to true. Again, everything seemed to be going

well here.

Step 3 and 4 instructed me to make a backup of the data and database and copy

it to the new machine. Fortunately, they were a little more specific with the

instructions_under_the_“backup”_section. But essentially, I used rsync to

transfer the files from the 1950 to the R520. And then I made a backup of the

MariaDB per the instructions. More on that in a minute, as this was where,

unbeknownst to me, the problem started. It shows and example, like this:

mysqldump --single-transaction -h [server] -u [username] -p[password] [db_name]

nextcloud-sqlbkp_`date +"%Y%m%d"`.bak

I named it much simpler, no need for the date here. The later half of the

fourth step was to restore the MariaDB, which I did, like the instructions say:

mysql -h [server] -u [username] -p[password] [db_name] < nextcloud-sqlbkp.bak

This did indeed restore the database from MariaDB on the other machine. I even

checked, my database was there. Everything seemed fine.

From here, steps 5 is to test it, and steps 6 is to change your dns record to

point to the new server. But I failed at step 5. I couldn’t get the Nextcloud

to work. In fact, the only thing I saw was an error like this:

âInternal Server Error

The server was unable to complete your request.

If this happens again, please send the technical details below to the server

administrator.

More details can be found in the server log.â

But there were no technical details. I tried to check the Nextcloud log, but it

wasn’t showing any current information. The site was so down, it wouldn’t work

enough to even log anything, I guess. So, I started shooting in the dark. What

was the problem? How could I deduce the issue without logs? Well, I did some

web searching and every instance of this seemed to be sql related.

So, I gave up for a while. Then, while doing something else, it hit me, like an

epiphany. I restored the database, but not the users of the database! DUH! I

jumped online to do a little research, and came across a great_article_on_how

to_do_just_that,_at_bitnami.com. This helped me do a full backup of the

database data (not just Nextcloud) like so:

mysqldump -A -u root -p > backup.sql\n\n And restore it on the other

machine like this:\n\nmysql -u root -p < backup.sql

Then I found this great_write-up_from_wisdmlabs.com on how to migrate the users

from one to another, like so:

mysql -B -N -uroot -p -e "SELECT CONCAT('\\'', user,'\\'@\\'', host, '\\'')

FROM user WHERE user != 'debian-sys-maint' AND user != 'root' AND user != ''"

mysql > mysql_all_users.txt\n# while read line; do mysql -B -N -uroot -

p<put_password_here> -e "SHOW GRANTS FOR $line"; done < mysql_all_users.txt >

mysql_all_users_sql.sql\n# sed -i 's/$/;/' mysql_all_users_sql.sql

Now I had the file with all users and their permissions! I copied that over to

the R520 and imported it with this simple line:

mysql -u root -p < mysql_all_users_sql.sql

And, praise God, after all that, my Nextcloud started working! I was really

starting to get worried that I’d have to start over from scratch!

So, if you plan to migrate your Nextcloud from one server to another, keep in

mind that the instructions tell you how to back up the data from your MariaDB/

SQL database, but they don’t mention that you need your user information as

well. Or that you will need to add said users after the fact. You all probably

knew that already, but for a new to Nextcloud guy like me, this step was really

important!

Linux – keep it simple.