[SAC] Mailman migration, backups

[Martin Spott]

On Sun, Oct 16, 2011 at 10:46:33PM -0700, Frank Warmerdam wrote:
> On 11-10-16 10:16 PM, Markus Neteler wrote:
> >On Mon, Oct 17, 2011 at 5:29 AM, Frank Warmerdam<warmerdam at pobox.com>  wrote:

> >>I'm making progress on the mailman migration.  I have almost
> >>completed a test migration to the VM.  It seems rebulding the
> >>HTML archive pages from the master .mbox file is pretty slow!

> >it would be pretty cool to avoid rebulding the HTML archives since
> >all links to existing emails found in past messages and the various
> >trac instances etc will become invalid (usually the mailman archive
> >URLs to messages end up shifted).

> It is not immediately clear to me that the archives would be
> renumbered when regenerated but it is possible.

Last time I've migrated a Mailman instance, an old, custom-installed
Mailman on Solaris/Sparc to a more recent one on Debian Linux, just
copying the entire mailman work directory over to the new machine was
the only action required to migrate the data.
If I were to accomplish the migration of the OSGeo Mailman, I wouldn't
expose myself to unneccessary trouble which probably hides behind
rebuilding the archive.

> >Isn't a transfer of the HTML archives with rsync enough?
> 
> /me sighs.
> 
> I can't even complete a "du" command over the html archives.  I am not sure
> rsync would ever finish.  I suppose I could try it.

root at peer1_1:archives # pwd
/var/lib/mailman/archives
root at peer1_1:archives # du -hs *
19G	private
20K	public


Not a big deal, just requires waiting a few more minutes (we're running
an old-fashioned filesystem on this machine  ;-)

You probably want to run 'rsync' at least twice: First to get the big
chunk over and once more to catch those EMails which have arrived in
the meantime.  Maybe it's even easier just to build a tarball for the
first chunk.  Rsyncing the remaining changes should be a matter of just
a couple of minutes - run a 'find' and 'du' on the directory before to
make sure at least the directory index is in cache.  Thus if you make
an announcement, stopping the OSGeo mail service for this period might
be acceptable in order to have everything archived.

Cheers,
	Martin.
-- 
 Unix _IS_ user friendly - it's just selective about who its friends are !
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