[Mailman-Users] move mail lists from Solaris to redhat

[Mark Sapiro]

Dany Cuyt wrote:

>Currently we have mailman running on an old Sun sparc with Solaris 8.
>I installed mailman on a new linux server with Redhat 4. I did some 
>tests and mailman seems to work fine on the new system with newly 
>created lists. The next step is to move the mail lists from the Solaris 
>system to the Redat system. Does someone has done this before?
>Can I just move the content of the lists, archive/public and 
>archive/private folders? I noticed that Linux is using sometimes a 
>different file extension than on Sun. As an example config.pck is found 
>on linux and config.db is found on Solaris


Generally, you can just move the archives/private/* and lists/*
directories except maybe not for the 'mailman' list if there is one on
the old server, because there already is one on the new server since
Mailman is running there. The symlinks in archives/public/ will be
regenerated by Mailman as the lists are accessed, but you can move
them if you want if the paths are correct.

The config.db->config.pck and maybe requests.db->requests.pck is not a
Solaris->RedHat difference. It is a Mailman version difference
2.0->2.1 in the case of config.db->config.pck and 2.1.4->2.1.5 in the
case of requests.db->requests.pck. Mailman will convert these for you
the first time the list is accessed on the new server, as long as you
have not already created the lists there. I.e. if Mailman finds only a
config.db and maybe config.db.last, it will convert it to the proper
config.pck, but if there is already a config.pck there, it will ignore
the config.db.

Do not try to rename config.db to config.pck. The formats are entirely
different.

There may still be issues after you move the lists if the new server
has a different domain name. In this case, you have to run fix_url on
all the moved lists in order to fix the names and you may want to
rebuild the archives with bin/arch in order to fix the 'more
information about this list' links to the 'listinfo' page. If you are
going to do this step, then you only need to move the
archives/private/*.mbox directories as the rest will be rebuilt from
the archives/private/*.mbox/*.mbox files.

Run

bin/fix_url.py

and

bin/arch --help

for more info in these tools. There is also info on this in the FAQ
<http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/faqw-mm.py>, but the specific info in
FAQ 3.4 is somewhat out of date.

I see this post may be 'too late' but I'll send it anyway. (I hope I'm
not contradicting myself).

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