[SAC] Moving the mail server off of osgeo1

[Markus Neteler]

On Fri, Sep 23, 2011 at 7:37 PM, Howard Butler <hobu.inc at gmail.com> wrote:
> Alex (and others with mail migration experience),
>
> I would like to spearhead the effort to move our mail operations off of osgeo1 and into a virtual machine inside of OSL.  I think the timeline to have this done is by Oct 31st.
>
> Steps to implement:
>
> 1) Determine where things are going to land. I will coordinate with Alex on this one.  I presume we'll put it on one of the existing VMs and cook up backula scripts to keep things together
> 2) Determine what things to migrate
>        a) mailman
>                i) archives -- do we run apache on our mail server, or serve these out some other way?

Important: please copy over the HTML archives (I guess you will
exactly do this).
Reason: tons of URLs point into it, in case of re-generating the
archive from the mbox
files the URLs would be messed up as they often get shifted.

>                ii) mboxes
>        b) aliases
>        c) user accounts?
> 3) Notify and plan for an outage -- mailing lists are the one resource that everyone seems to interact with OSGeo infrastructure with. Mail server migrations are often painful. We should set the expectations for our users that things may burp a bit during the migration.
> 4) Execute migration on Oct 29th-Oct 30th
> 5) Pick up the pieces.
>
> If anyone has moved a big mailman installation from one server to another,

I have done it once together with FrankW: moving the GRASS ML (1992-today)
from my institute to OSGeo in 2006.

> I'd be interested to hear your experience. If you have ideas how this should go, I'd also like to hear them.  I'm willing to do the legwork to make this happen, as lack of mail migration makes for a convenient excuse to leave the Drupal installs alone too. Those (and their databases) need to be moved soon too.

There may be subtle differences since the migration will be done from
Redhat to Debian (right?). However, the migration should be rather
straightforward (copy over directories into the right target places, to know
them create a test ML first on the target server). Then populate it with
the other lists.

Here the receipt from 2006, basically FrankW's notes:

When migrating from one server to another, get the .mbox files, and
the whole /var/lib/mailman/lists/<listname> directory, and follow
roughly the following steps as root (or sudo each step):

One example:

  # newlist -q grass-announce warmerdam at pobox.com junk
  # cd /var/lib/mailman/lists/grass-announce
  # cp ~warmerdam/grass-announce/* .
  # withlist -l -r fix_url grass-announce
  # /usr/lib/mailman/bin/arch grass-announce ~warmerdam/grass-announce.mbox
  # chown -R mailman.mailman /var/lib/mailman/lists/grass-announce
  # chown -R mailman.mailman /var/lib/mailman/archives/private/grass-announce*
  # genaliases
  # /sbin/service postfix restart
  # mailmanctl restart

If the list name on the new system is different than on the old
system, it may be prudent to fix this up on the mail page of the web
admin interface after the withlist command has been used, and before
the archives are imported.

Cheers
Markus