First of all, we need to get all the accounts and create a backup of their accounts, this is done using a couple of bash lines and parsing the file /etc/trueuserowners. That file contains every account on the server and the accounts that own it. This following will go over that file, take out the resellers accounts and back them up one by one. The best way to make sure no mistake happens is to ensure that /home or /home2 or any other /home directories because the /scripts/pkgacct creates them there. We also use cpuwatch not to create excessive load on the server when creating the backup. It will stop the process once load averages go higher than 10.

for i in `cat /etc/trueuserowners | grep resellerusername | awk -F ':' '{ print $1; }'`;
do /usr/local/cpane/bin/cpuwatch 10 /scripts/pkgacct $i;
done;

Usually this takes a while so this is what you can do if it’s halfway done to save time

/usr/bin/rsync --delete -avvxHt --progress -e ssh /home/cpmove-* 1.2.3.4:~

This will start moving the files from the old server to the new one, we use rsync so that we can just run it again after the full backup is done so we don’t have to restart the whole process again. Once it’s done and all data has been moved, another loop, I did this one quickly however I think it could be cleaner, if someone has a better way to do with (regexp?), please let me know.

for i in `ls | grep cpmove- | awk -F '.' '{ print $1 }' | awk -F '-' '{ print $2 }'`;
do /scripts/restorepkg $i;
done;

After finishing that, you should be all done!

The code isn’t long at all and it isn’t anything genius, first I generate a small list of the accounts that are in the backup directory, we only run weekly backups and our backup is mounted at /backup so here is the command that we used first:

ls /backup/cpbackup/weekly/ > accts.backup

Now, a small loop that I created so that it filters out all the users that are in the backup directory but are not existent on the server anymore (or do not have the same username).

for i in `ls /home/`; do
replace $i '' -- accts.backup
done

There was a lot of accounts to be removed or deleted as this servers’ backups have been left hanging for a while so it would be a very hard task to actually find the accounts that have high disk usage so I made the following script that takes the size of each one of the accounts and puts it in a file.

for i in `cat accts.backup`; do
du -s /backup/cpbackup/weekly/$i
done > accts.size

After that, we make our life a lot easier by sorting the results by the size, however, there is one dangerous thing I warn you from, the “dirs” directory might appear as the biggest one but it contains usually MySQL files and configuration files which are very important, you should simply ignore it.

sort –n accts.size > accts.sorted

Now, you have a file with all the accounts that do not exist on the server but have backups with their size sorted, you can just go and clean them up as you go, until then, I go back to erasing these useless space hogs!