Open http port after restart
Hello,
I'm very sorry, but I have no further knowledge about linode and linux. I took over the adminstration from another admin (with more experience in that matter), because they needed someone to help them with their website.
Now I have a big problem: We can't access our website anymore. I tried restarting the server, but it didn't work. I asked support and they wrote me "I am not seeing any open http or https ports.". I didn't changed anything (despite the restart using the simple link/button), so I don't have any idea how this could happened.
Can you help me to do that? Please have in mind, that I really have no idea to manage it :-( I know, we are planing to change the webhosting, because I'm more familiar with other systems, so please don't be hard on me not knowing what I'm using.
If you need more information, please let me know. We are using "My Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Profil"
Thanks a lot in advance
1 Reply
jtoscani
Linode Staff
Before making any changes, I'd recommend that you enable backups for your server, if not already. That way you always have a clean slate to work from in case the work you're doing creates some issues within the server.
In addition, it's important to note that Ubuntu 10.04 LTS has reached it's End of Life in April 2015. That being the case, your system and the software running on it will stop receiving updates. You lose the ability to utilize the Ubuntu repositories as well, which disallows you from installing any new applications.
Given this, the best move going forward would be to upgrade your system to a more recent version of Ubuntu, such as Ubuntu 18.04 or 20.04 LTS. This is very involved, though, and I'll get into it more below; however, this will be a required task for the long-term security and viability of your website.
In the meantime, there are some steps you can try to get your site back online - I want to stress, though, that this would only be a bandaid fix.
Short-term steps
The fact that your ports 80 (HTTP) and 443 (HTTPS) are closed indicates that Apache is not running at the moment. To check the status of your service, you can run the following command:
sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 status
If that output confirms that Apache is not running, you'll want to start it up by issuing the following:
sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 start
Long-term Solution
Safely upgrading your distribution is not as straightforward as running a command, unfortunately. When you're doing such an extreme upgrade (10.04 to 18.04, for example) the best option is a migration. The steps, in a nutshell, are as follows:
- Create a new Linode with your new distribution
- Secure Your Server
- Install your applications
- Copy your files over from the old Linode to the new one
- Transfer your old IP address to the new server (note, this can only be done if your new Linode is in the same datacenter as the old Linode)
For more details and insight surrounding this process, you can check out the following Community post: How do I upgrade my existing Ubuntu installation?