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:

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#!/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/

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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.