Tonight I installed an Ensim server software update and it was the scariest thing I have done to the server so far.

At some point I had been following the security releases for Linux and such and there was some kind of sendmail problem that I wanted to fix, so I installed a bunch of RPMs to patch up sendmail.  Everything seemed to be fine.  I didn't think much more about it.

Well, a couple of weeks later (sometime last week) I noticed that the add user feature of the Ensim interface wasn't working properly.  So I couldn't add more email users to any of the domains.  That is a bad sign.

The only thing I could think to do was upgrade the Ensim software so that it possibly fixed the interface for adding new users.

The process was long and strange.  My first issue was doing a backup of everything in all of the virtual sites of the server, including MySQL.  I found a script, for which I paid $15.  It was very easy to install, but it didn't work.  Actually, it only half worked because it only backed up the files and not the databases.

Instead of fighting with that to make it work I ran a simple backup command on MySQL.  I figured that I probably wasn't going to be reinstaling individual databases if something went wrong anyway, which was the point of this specific script.

I finally got everything backed up and I downloaded the Ensim update.  It was huge.  Thankfully, I was using SSH to connect to the server, and the bandwidth out there was enough that it took virtually no time to download the whole thing.

After it was all downloaded I ran the script.  There was a strange problem with updating the base Red Hat installation.  Strange in that the Ensim upgrade script told me exactly what the problem was, what I needed to do to fix it, and where the files were that it had already downloaded to take care of the problem.  The only thing left to do would be run the update.  Well, why didn't it do that itself?  Oh, well.

I restarted the script after upgrading the core Red Hat rpms, and things seemed to be in business.  The script completed, but it said there were errors.

In three places in the error log I found the word "failed", but I couldn't figure what it was that caused the problem.  So I ran the script again.  This time the error log reported that there was nothing to install.

At this point, I brought up a web browser and tried to look at the site.  It worked fine.  The problem was in the administration interface.  It had been set into a maintenance mode, and there was no way to override it.

After doing a bit of searching on the Rackshack forums I found an article that talked about a file that contained a maintenance state number.  It said that if I changed this number from 2 to 4 things might return to normal.

I opened the file.  The file had a number.  The number 8.  "Hmm," I said.  I scratched my head.  I changed the number to 4 and saved it.  <shrug>

I restarted the webppliance and everything worked smoothly.  So now I have officially upgraded Ensim on the server.  Yay!  Adding new email addresses even works, so the whole project was a success.  Now I have to find time to do the next patch in the series.  Ugh!