Adam Jimenez | Plesk 9.2.1 Migration Problems

Plesk 9.2.1 Migration Problems

I think it was around Plesk 8.3 where everything in Plesk worked just about perfect. Since then Plesk 9 came out. I rushed to upgrade to Plesk 9 as soon as it was available. It had no discernible benefits and broke a lot of things like:

stopping email from working
automatically suspending domains when they went over quota
new interface where it's almost impossible to find anything
missing icons in said crappy interface

I managed to sort most of these out but if this wasn't enough in version 9 they had omitted the Plesk migration manager. Now this is pretty fundamental for transferring sites to different servers. You can supposedly do this with the backup/ restore program but it's a lot more complicated and buggy in my experience.

So anyway 5 months later we have Plesk 9.2.1 which has migration manager.

I migrated close to 100 domains. The migration was absolute hell and took the best part of 12 hours. Here's what I've learned about migration manager in Plesk 9.2.1:

Plesk Migration Manager won't anticipate lack of resources like domain limit/ disk space. So make sure you have plenty of both before you start.
when initiating a migration "host inaccessible" can also mean login incorrect
IP's must be set to shared to be picked up by the migration manager.
if an IP is in use, Plesk won't let you change it to shared. altho you can over-ride this in the MySQL table called ip_pool.
spam white-lists and black-lists are not migrated.
mysql stored procedures are not migrated.
after migration many sites were defaulting to the default plesk page. I had to stop/start them to get them to work.
when stopping/starting close to 100 domains at once Plesk freezes up and can take literally hours to recover.
one site in particular wouldn't migrate. it kept coming up with migration failed. i tried 5 times with different settings. Maybe because it was .tv - there isn't anything else perculiar about that domain. I finally managed to transfer it using the backup / restore facility..
Some folders were created with incorrect permissions. This is easy to fix - but I'm not sure why that should happen.