It took two months, and then a few days to catch our breath, but we migrated again, neatly at a slow pace, step by step, deliberate... until it all went wrong and then went right again... Enough to tell, then.

I had already more or less announced it when I told you about the transition from Robohost to Vimexx (see the blog of 7/4/2021 under point 2.). With the current provider, I have the option to purchase a VPS at a reasonable price. And so I did, eventually, after all the urgent matters had been resolved. As of July 8, 2022 (indeed, the day I entered the previous blog, about the NAS that was sent to the landfill) we have a VPS at Vimexx, with 2 virtual CPU cores, 4GB RAM, and 100GB HDD. That is large and powerful enough for our current applications. And, unlike before, those applications now also include email. It was nice and easy to store all that in one place, after all, that place is also the place where the domains are registered and the DNS is defined. And after a month of messing around, it all worked out. In addition, I went past a deep abyss twice, with slight permanent damage as a result...

An overview of the steps and actions:

• I ordered a VPS according to the above specs, with (of course) Ubuntu on it. That was version 20.04 at the time. Installed Virtualmin with all the trimmings and also Drupal, in the latest versions of both Drupal-7 (for the webshop) and Drupal-9 (for the rest). Defined the (virtual) web servers, set up the databases, and migrated the websites running on the Hezner VPS to them. In the meantime, I have done this so often that it has almost become routine.
• Then made a backup of the new VPS in Virtualmin. It was now August 13. Thank God for that bright moment!
• The sites on the Hezner VPS were now completely taken over. The DNS was also well-adjusted and every call led to the Vimexx VPS. The setup on the German site had therefore become superfluous and I disconnected it completely. I have terminated the Hezner subscription asap. The last payment was made on this on September 3, indeed for part of the month. So Hezner is now all over and out. Was this sequence smart? In retrospect, I think that this VPS should have been held in reserve a bit longer... So that was the first abyss.
• The new VPS ran smoothly, without e-mail yet, but nice. But, because the VPS providers are always waiting with the latest version of an OS, they ran under Focal Fossa, while the home server, just like the Hezner VPS before, already run under Jammy Jellyfish. I saw no objection to doing this for the new VPS (renamed VxVPS). And indeed Jammy also seemed (!) to run nicely on this one.
• It was urgently time to tinker further, especially with the e-mail. Postfix ran, just like Postmap and Dovecot, together with Spamassassin and ClamAV, in short, the whole package for successful e-mail management. I spent quite some time working on it, but it never went really well. At one point I even started looking for alternatives to Postfix. There are, but nothing integrates easily with Virtualmin. Most sent emails got stuck somewhere in the outbox. And received emails that did not arrive at all. Log files gave insufficient information. But in order to test it properly, the old setup, i.e. the Vimexx mail servers, had to be closed first. So I had nothing left for a while, except for a bucketful of light panic.
• Bright moment: Everything seems to run under Jammy, but this is the first time I've also tried Postfix that way. Before I complain to Virtualmin, I better make sure that my problems are not OS-related. So the plan was to first test everything under Focal Fossa, i.e. Ubuntu 20.04. How do you do that? Simply, first make a full backup of the Virtualmin setup, then reinstall the OS, and then again Virtualmin and all the extras. I made that backup internally on the HDD of the VPS because it is then a fraction more complete than when you download it directly. In the meantime it was really time for bed, so tomorrow just start downloading the backup, and OS again and then the rest.
• The next morning I gave the rebuild order for the VPS in good spirits. Hey, shouldn't I have done something else first... ??? Where did my backup go?!?!?!?!?
  So this abyss was really really deep.
• There was no point simping long on this. Just keep going. The VPS was now running under a fresh and clean install of Focal Fossa. Virtualmin installed. Created the virtual servers one by one, and exactly according to what is really needed. The sbgs.nl sites were created as shadow sites during migration. But this migration doesn't need to move the DNS, so we don't need shadows. SBGS is no longer needed (until the next migration). Saves another domain.
• The backup of August 13th. unpacked on my home server and from there uploaded the database dumps to the VxVPS and read them into the databases of the new sites. And after some patient fiddling, it all worked. Of course, without the addition in the site of Healingpraktijk Ajna, I have to reconstruct that again.
• Reactivated the e-mail as soon as possible. Users entered, with associated passwords, and checked on my desktop. Well, the connection to the mail server is fine. Also retrieved the backed-up emails. But those were from August 13, and in the meantime, it was the end of August. Nothing can be done about it. Those emails also all come back in the mail app on the desktop.

And from the beginning of September, all new e-mails arrive properly and sent e-mails leave our premises without any problems. In the end, it all turned out well, with two weeks of lost emails and a lost entry on Ajna's site. That's what I mean by the abyss. It has mostly ended with a fizzle, but still...
In any case, we now enjoy a freshly installed VPS from provider Vimexx, a fraction more expensive than Hezner, but our German friends had already announced price increases, because "energy is getting very expensive these days...". On the other hand, I was also able to cancel the shared hosting subscription with Vimexx, so after some time the price tag is the same as before.

What will be the next adventure?