[Mailman-Users] migrating mailman lists

[Paul Tomblin]

Quoting Kelsey Forsythe (forsythe at chem.iupui.edu):
> I've recently moved to a new server.  It is an Xserve G5 running  
> 10.4.3 OSX.
> I'd like to migrate the mailman lists from the old server (Xserve G4).
> 
> Does anyone have experience migrating lists?
> If so, please let me know what procedure you followed.

If you have command line access to both servers, it's dead easy.  I've
done it twice.  Here is the procedure I followed.  Note that your file
paths may differ because OS X does strange things:

1. Copied all of /var/lib/mailman/lists/ from the old server to the new
one.
2. Fixed the permissions with "chown -R list.list /var/lib/mailman/lists/"
3. Fixed the urls for the new one with "withlist -l -r fix_url [listname]"
for each list.  (Only necessary if the new server has a different domain
name than the old one - one time I was moving from xcski.com to
list.xcski.com and the other time I was keeping the same list.xcski.com
url.)
4. Copied all /var/lib/mailman/archives/private/*mbox/*mbox to the new
server.
5. Fixed the permissions with "chown -R list.list
/var/lib/mailman/archives/private"
6. Regenerated the archives using "/var/lib/mailman/bin/arch [listname]"
for each list.  Note that if your archives are big, this process can
consume all the memory in your system and then some, so you may have to
split the mbox files up and regenerate the list archives in peices or use
the "--start" and "--end" options to arch.


-- 
Paul Tomblin <ptomblin at xcski.com> http://blog.xcski.com/
We'll burn that bridge when we come to it.