[Mailman-Users] Restoring mailman

[Mark Sapiro]

Michael Sullivan wrote:

>About a month ago I had a year-old version of mailman running on my
>Fedora Core 1 mail server.  FC1 installed mailman in /var/mailman, which
>I added to my daily backup schedule.
<snip>
>Is it possible to obtain the subscriber list without
>access to the old mailman interface?

It is /var/mailman/lists/<listname>/config.pck if the old version is
2.1.x or /var/mailman/lists/<listname>/config.db if older.

If it is config.pck, just replace the config.pck for the newly created
list with the one from the backup. This should restore subscribers,
list configuration, subscriber options, etc. from the old list
configuration.

If the old file is a config.db, you would need to restore the old
config.db to the new lists/<listname>/ directory and also remove any
existing config.pck and config.pck.last files from that directory.
Mailman should then be able to update the list configuration and store
it as a pickle in config.pck, but there may be problems with this due
to (as I understand it) the format of a Python marshal (the config.db
file) not being constant across Python versions. I.e. Mailman will be
able to convert it iff the Python on the new system can read it.

--
Mark Sapiro <msapiro at value.net>       The highway is for gamblers,
San Francisco Bay Area, California    better use your sense - B. Dylan