My Matrix server is on Oracle Cloud. At one point, while messing with something on it, I accidentally enabled the firewall for port 22, so I can no longer access it via SSH. I think I also disabled password login, as I cannot log in over Oracle’s remote terminal service. Also, the backups had filled up the drive space without me noticing, so it hadn’t made backups in six months. Yes, I’m dumb.

At this point, I’ve given up hope for recovering the data on the server, but I would prefer to keep as much as I can when making a new server. The information online about making a new server on the same domain all involves copying over some data from the old server, so is it possible to keep the domain name when making a new server? It seems that it is not possible to make a new account with the same name on the same domain because it messes with federation, so I will need a new account name. Is that all correct?

My current plan is this:

  • use Matrix migration to transfer my rooms to a temporary account
  • delete the server
  • make a new server with the same domain
  • make an account with a different name on the new server
  • use Matrix migration again to transfer the rooms from the temporary account to the new account

Does this all seem like it would work, and is there a better solution? Thank you for the help.

Edit: What I ended up doing was this:

  1. Upgrade to a paid account (my account was previously free)—this can’t be reverted, but you won’t get charged if you’re always below the limit
  2. Export the boot drive to a bucket
  3. Download the bucket
  4. Extract the downloaded bucket and take whatever data you need from it
  5. Delete the bucket
  6. Replace the boot drive (or create a new server and delete the old one). You may be able to fix the issue then upload the image again, but I just applied the vital details (signing key, primarily, but you can also use the database) to a new image.
  • @nachtigall@feddit.de
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    10 months ago

    I can’t tell about the rest of your plan, but what is important for federation to work properly is to use your previous signing key. You should retrieve that from your backup. If you do not use the same key, it is possible that other servers that previously communicated with your (old) server will reject communication with new server if the keys do not match.