We are (finally) about to upgrade exim.org to a less obsolete version of Mailman [the excuse up to now has been that the box was overloaded and a Pentium 200 wouldn't handle the upgrades needed to get current!].
In one transition we intend to:- * Move to new hardware (Original pentium to P-IV) * Move to a new OS (Linux (RH7.3) to FreeBSD) * Move to a new Python (1.5.2 to 2.3) * Move to a new directory layout
and we would like to keep the change relatively transparent :-) In particular we would like to keep the archive URLs stable, so regenerating the archives from the mboxes is not really an option despite the fact it would give us slightly better handling of the few attachments that have made it to the list. [The archives have had messages removed in the past so a regenerate would not keep numbering stable]
I've just been looking at Barry's notes for his list relocation at http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-developers@python.org/msg03127.html
Would the process detailed there work OK for this sort of move - obviously I need to transfer the complete tree for a list from the old machine to the new one, but thats easy enough. The main thing I was wondering about is whether the python saved files (ie the list db file etc) will transfer OK, or whether they have machine/os/python-version dependencies that will preclude doing things this way?
Cheers Nigel.
[ Nigel Metheringham Nigel.Metheringham@InTechnology.co.uk ] [ - Comments in this message are my own and not ITO opinion/policy - ]
At 8:46 AM +0100 2004-07-15, Nigel Metheringham wrote:
In one transition we intend to:- * Move to new hardware (Original pentium to P-IV) * Move to a new OS (Linux (RH7.3) to FreeBSD) * Move to a new Python (1.5.2 to 2.3) * Move to a new directory layout
Out of curiosity, what version of Mailman are you running now, and will you be upgrading to 2.1.5?
In particular we would like to keep the archive URLs stable, so regenerating the archives from the mboxes is not really an option despite the fact it would give us slightly better handling of the few attachments that have made it to the list. [The archives have had messages removed in the past so a regenerate would not keep numbering stable]
Ouch.I've just been looking at Barry's notes for his list relocation at http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-developers@python.org/msg03127.html
We just moved python.org to a new machine, so perhaps this needs to be revisited and updated.
I don't know the specifics for the old hardware, but the new hardware is not bad:
Quad Pentium 4 XEON (2.2GHz) CPUs
1GB of RAM
Adaptec I2O hardware RAID controller (RAID 1)
Ext3fs
135GB total disk space
1.9GB of swap
I know we were running Exim on the old machine. However, due to lack of people on the project who are sufficiently familiar with this program, we're instead running postfix on the new machine. Therefore, I can't speak for how those changes may affect things.
We're still tuning the anti-spam settings (especially training the SpamBayes stuff), but what we've got now seems to be at least a decent starting point. Since the machine is hosted for us by the very kind folks at XS4ALL, we also have the pleasure of dumping all outbound messages on their mail relay servers, so we don't have to deal with deep queues, etc....
Would the process detailed there work OK for this sort of move - obviously I need to transfer the complete tree for a list from the old machine to the new one, but thats easy enough.
I can say that we had the new machine set up for a little while before we tool the old one down, so we had time to test that we had copied over everything correctly, or made appropriate adjustments as necessary.
The main thing I was wondering about is whether the python saved files (ie the list db file etc) will transfer OK, or whether they have machine/os/python-version dependencies that will preclude doing things this way?
I would be concerned about the python structures surviving such a big transition intact. I'd want to have a dump of the list configuration in a textual form, which could then be re-imported on the other side.
-- Brad Knowles, <brad.knowles@skynet.be>
"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
-- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), reply of the Pennsylvania
Assembly to the Governor, November 11, 1755SAGE member since 1995. See <http://www.sage.org/> for more info.
I didn't get to answering this anywhere near as quickly as Brad responded to my queryy :-(
On Thu, 2004-07-15 at 09:31, Brad Knowles wrote:
At 8:46 AM +0100 2004-07-15, Nigel Metheringham wrote:
In one transition we intend to:- [change everything!]
Out of curiosity, what version of Mailman are you running now, and will you be upgrading to 2.1.5?
We currently run 2.0.13 with a few relatively minor modifications (archive html mods for indexing and MIME attachment blocking). We will be going to 2.1.5 (I see the FreeBSD ports tree is older than that so I guess I will install from source distribution instead).
The main thing I was wondering about is whether the python saved files (ie the list db file etc) will transfer OK, or whether they have machine/os/python-version dependencies that will preclude doing things this way?
I would be concerned about the python structures surviving such a big transition intact. I'd want to have a dump of the list configuration in a textual form, which could then be re-imported on the other side.
This doesn't have to be done in one huge lump, so I can take stuff across, attempt to take it into the new system and see what happens. Obviously if someone has hard data on how things are likely to break it makes it easier to to take a more direct path to the final solution :-)
Nigel.-- [ Nigel Metheringham Nigel.Metheringham@InTechnology.co.uk ] [ - Comments in this message are my own and not ITO opinion/policy - ]
On Thu, 2004-07-15 at 08:46, Nigel Metheringham wrote:
I've just been looking at Barry's notes for his list relocation at http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-developers@python.org/msg03127.html
I tried this on a test list, and it fails...
Doing the step:- % bin/withlist -l -r fix_url exim-dev Importing fix_url... Running fix_url.fix_url()... Loading list exim-dev (locked) Traceback (most recent call last): File "bin/withlist", line 275, in ? main() File "bin/withlist", line 256, in main r = do_list(listname, args, func) File "bin/withlist", line 182, in do_list m = MailList.MailList(listname, lock=LOCK) File "/home/services/mailman/Mailman/MailList.py", line 126, in __init__ self.Lock() File "/home/services/mailman/Mailman/MailList.py", line 163, in Lock self.Load() File "/home/services/mailman/Mailman/MailList.py", line 630, in Load self.CheckValues() File "/home/services/mailman/Mailman/MailList.py", line 712, in CheckValues for name, pattern, desc, emptyflag in self.topics: File "/home/services/mailman/Mailman/MailList.py", line 144, in __getattr__ raise AttributeError, name AttributeError: topics
Basically its fixing up topic which doesn't exist in 2.0.x. I'll see about working round this...
Nigel.-- [ Nigel Metheringham Nigel.Metheringham@InTechnology.co.uk ] [ - Comments in this message are my own and not ITO opinion/policy - ]
participants (2)
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Brad Knowles -
Nigel Metheringham