Here’s the situation: You have two godaddy Virtual Private Server (VPS) accounts (or any Plesk-based hosting VPS)  and you need to migrate client accounts and domains between them.  Only problem is Plesk is being a little bitch when it comes to the actual migration.

Here is the NORMAL process for doing a Plesk migration between servers (specifically at GoDaddy): [NOTE: This process seamlessly allows you to migrate user accounts, domains, databases, files, file permissions, the whole damn thing!]

1. You backup EVERYTHING on the old server, including files and MYSQL databases.  (PHPMyAdmin is a good export tool if you don’t know how to back a database up via SSH.)
2. Go to the NEW server, click on the SERVER link on the left, and choose Migration Manager
3. Enter your OLD server’s IP address and the root password. If you do not have root access, you’ll want to get it, or at least have an account that has root level permissions.
4. Click on NEXT and follow the wizard as it takes you through the process of migrating user accounts and domains.

Now here’s where things get tricky. On a normal VPS, you’d have root access. On a Godaddy (boo) VPS, they don’t allow you to log in as root (for FTP or SSH), so you have to use “su -” (Note the ‘-’ sign) when you’re logged in as another user.

This is what typically shows up when you try to use the migration manager to transfer one Godaddy VPS to another:

Cannot send scout to the remote host

Failed to execute scout.
The return code is 1
The output on STDERR is
sudo: sorry, you must have a tty to run sudo

All this error means is that the user account you entered does not have sufficient permissions on the server to do the migration.  Normally you would simply use the root account and things would be peachy, but with Godaddy, they like to make it difficult.

Here’s the solution. [NOTE: This is technical and requires you to be damn careful else you'll really hose your old system up and TRUST ME, Godaddy DOES NOT offer support for VPS accounts beyond setting them up and tearing them down. [Everything you do is on your own shoulders..]

1. Using your normal user account, (not Plesk admin, but the user account you have for the server/SSH/FTP) SSH into your server.  If you don’t know what I’m talking about, download PUTTY.EXE and do the following: Enter the IP address of your server in the HOST NAME field, then make sure connection type is SSH.  Click on OPEN.  A black window should come up and you can enter your FTP username, then password, and you should be given a prompt.
2. Once you are logged into the Godaddy VPS server via SSH, you can type ‘SU -’ [no quotes] and enter your password again. This will change the prompt to say root on the left hand side.  If you use the ‘-’ it will give you access to the root PATH, which is necessary for the next step.
3. Type ‘visudo’ and hit enter. This will take you to the edit screen of the SUDO security configuration.  Find the section that has the following:  “root   ALL=(ALL)    ALL”  and below that, add your username along with the ALL entries.   “username  ALL=(ALL)   ALL”   [NOTE: To edit, move the insertion point to the space you wish to type, then start typing.   When finished, hit the colon key ":" and type W to write the file, then hit the colon key again and type 'quit'.]
4. At this point your username should have the appropriate configuration.  Go back to the NEW server’s Migration Manager and start it fresh, this time using the user account, it’s password, and it’s password again for the SUDO password.

That should take you through the entire Migration Manager wizard process and help you get your domains and client accounts transferred to the new server.

When you are finished with the migration, and if you plan on keeping the OLD server, be sure to remove the user entry from the sudo security config file using the process above.

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