[Mailman-Users] upgrading, changing MTA and moving between servers

[Mark Sapiro]

Kim Leandersson wrote:
>
>I've read some pages telling me that the administrative addresses has
>changed between these versions. I'm not sure if the best way is:
>
>1) to create the lists on the new server, use the config-list script to
>export the config and the import this on the new server


Not the best way for two reasons.

When you dump the config with config_list -o and then import with
config_list -i, the 2.0 attributes which are redefined/replaced in 2.1
won't be properly converted.

Transferring the list membership (via list_members -> add_members)
doesn't preserve all member options.


>2) just manually copy the lists/listname and archives directories to the
>new server


This is the way to go.

Caveats - Do not create the list on the new server before the transfer.
If you do, you will create a lists/listname/config.pck and Mailman
will never see to lists/listname/config.db you move over.

Does the domain name change? If so, you'll need to run fix_url on the
moved lists and may want to rebuild the archives with bin/arch --wipe
in order to fix the absolute links to the listinfo page on the archive
index pages (or you can fix these manually or with a script).

You will also have to deal with telling qmail about the lists, but I
can't help with that.


>3) upgrade the old server to 2.1.5 and the move to new server?


No need to do this. 2) is sufficient.


>At this moment I prefer 1) since I'm really not that familiar with qmail
>and it would be nice if the system handled the creation of aliases.

Mailman doesn't know qmail aliases. Mailman can do Postfix
automatically (MTA = 'Postfix'), and exim and maybe others can be
configured so aliases are not needed. There is a qmail-to-mailman.py
script in the contrib directory of the distribution to eliminate the
need for aliases in qmail, but I don't know to use it or what its
limitations are.


>But
>how should I then procede? Should I run config-list to export/import or
>can I just copy som directories to the new server and fix the
>permissions and the URL:s?


Do the latter as I indicate above.

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