I'm in the middle of planning an upgrade of our mailman installation and was looking for some pointers. The current version is 2.0.11 and I'm planning on going to the current 2.1.5. I'm actually moving the installation from an older desktop system to a newer server

I just did a 2.0.3 to 2.1.5 same-server upgrade last night. It seemed to go fairly smoothly - I did a clean install and then copied lists/* and archives/* to the new directories. I'm always leery of upgrades-in-place... some sort of cruft always seems to get left behind.

I made sure to shut down the old mailman and sendmail, kill all processes, and flush the old queue.

The main gotcha that took me a while to figure out (it was *early* in the morning by the time I did this!) was the extra lines that needed to be added for each list to virtusertable (the server is running Sendmail) - the 2.0.x versions seemed to have fewer addresses per list. Without some of the new entries - like listname-bounces - no outbound mail was being processed. Got stuck for a while on thinking smrsh and the mailman wrapper was the problem...

The server had about 55 lists on it; rather than type out all the virtusertable entries by hand, I wrote an ugly little Perl script to read through a file containing the list names and spit out another file containing all the virtusertable entries. Here it is - maybe it will save you some time!

#!/usr/bin/perl

# Script to generate virtusertable entries # for Mailman 2.1.5 # # (c) 2004 by Bruce Timberlake <bruce at brtnet dot org> # # create all-lists.txt with # # bin/list_lists -b > all-lists.txt

$listfile = "all-lists.txt"; $virtfile = "virt-file.txt"; $hostname = "\@www.example.com";

open INPUT, "<$listfile" or die "Can't open $listfile: $!\n"; open OUTPUT, ">$virtfile" or die "Can't open $virtfile: $!\n";

while (<INPUT>) { chomp; print OUTPUT "## List: $_\n"; print OUTPUT "$_$hostname\t$_\n"; print OUTPUT "$_-admin$hostname\t$_-admin\n"; print OUTPUT "$_-bounces$hostname\t$_-bounces\n"; print OUTPUT "$_-confirm$hostname\t$_-confirm\n"; print OUTPUT "$_-join$hostname\t$_-join\n"; print OUTPUT "$_-leave$hostname\t$_-leave\n"; print OUTPUT "$_-owner$hostname\t$_-owner\n"; print OUTPUT "$_-request$hostname\t$_-request\n"; print OUTPUT "$_-subscribe$hostname\t$_-subscribe\n"; print OUTPUT "$_-unsubscribe$hostname\t$_-unsubscribe\n"; print OUTPUT "\n"; } close OUTPUT; close INPUT;

I told you it was ugly! :) But it was about 3 am when I did it, so... I generated the all-lists.txt file by using "bin/list_lists -b" in the new Mailman install after I copied the lists etc. across. Then I opened virtusertable in vi, manually deleted the old entries for the 2.0.3 install and imported virt-file.txt. A quick makemap, restarting sendmail and Mailman, and all was well.

Since you're switching machines, you'll need to deal with a DNS changeover, and maybe editing mm_cfg.py to change the hostname etc. Or are you going to use the old domain name on the new server, so that the list address domain stays the same? I didn't have to deal with that, so I can't comment.