[Mailman-Users] Setting up lists on a replacement list server w/different name

[Greg Earle]

On Nov 18, 2005, at 9:02 PM, Mark Sapiro <msapiro at value.net> wrote:

>> I'm pretty new to Mailman and Postfix (I'm more familiar with
>> Sendmail and Courier on Solaris) so I'm not really sure how to
>> address this - I suppose one answer is to simply turn the old
>> box off and rename the new one "rushmore" and *then* mass-create
>> the lists on the new one so they all have "rushmore" tagged in
>> them (from "list at rushmore" to any embedded references to "rushmore"
>> in the Mailman files), but that's a bit touchy - some of the
>> lists on the old one are still used daily, and some are rather
>> important (like our Section mailing list, used every day).
>
> If you were to do this, you wouldn't need to create lists on the new
> box. Just stop incoming mail on the old Machine, allow the queues to
> drain, copy the lists/ and archives/ directories from the old machine
> to the new and start mailman on the new machine and switch the DNS.

The old machine is running Majordomo and Sendmail, not Mailman and
Postfix.  Sorry if that wasn't clearer.  So it's not a matter of
just bringing lists/archives/etc. across, alas.

Turning off the old machine and creating the lists on the new,
renamed-to-be-the-old machine would then mean that the new
lists would have to work straight out of the box, with no
downtime.  Given my unfamiliarity with the software, this isn't
too likely (in fact, I can't even get the "crontab.in" cron jobs
working; why do the default entries in that file contain entries
that say "mailman /var/mailman/mail/<program>" instead of just
"/var/mailman/mail/<program>"?  It results in the not-unexpected
error "/bin/sh: line 1: mailman: command not found"), so I was
looking at possible alternatives - surely I'm not the first
person to install Mailman on a new system that is designed to
replace an old one (with the new one being renamed to take over
the old one's name)?

	- Greg