[Mailman-Users] Migration to new server

[Mark Sapiro]

On 6/16/2011 8:35 AM, William Ashworth wrote:
>
> Currently, a client of mine has a mailman list running since 2006 on
> a server with a company they no longer do business with. We're
> wanting to consolidate resources for their organization and migrate
> them to a cPanel web host that supports mailman.


cPanel will be a complication if the old server is not also cPanel.


> Is there any concern about mailman versions between servers or
> anything else I might not be thinking of? What's the best way to go
> about moving them to another server supporting mailman?


As long as both Mailman versions are 2.1.x and the target version is as
new or newer than the source version and the source version uses the
standard MemberAdaptor (i.e. no custom member database), this is
normally completely straightforward. It may be complicated if going from
non-cPanel to cPanel.


> I can say with fair certainty that we don't have root access to the
> old server, so I'm not sure what needs to be planned for during a
> migration between service providers. Thanks.


You need to stop Mailman on the old server or at least be sure that your
lists are 'quiet'. You need to get all the lists/*/config.pck files and
all the archives/private/*.mbox/*.mbox files from the old server and
move them to the new server.

The cPanel complication is that the *'s above are listnames and in a
non-cPanel installation, the listname of the listx at example.com list is
'listx', but in cPanel it is 'listx_example.com', so those directories
and files will need to be placed on the cPanel machine with their cPanel
names. I think this is the only complication.

After moving the files, you should run Mailman's bin/check_perms to fix
any permission issues, run fix_url and run 'bin/arch --wipe LISTNAME'
using the cPanel listnames for each list to rebuild the pipermail
archive on the new host.

I'm not sure exactly how to run fix_url in a cPanel installation or if
it will even work, and I'm not sure it's necessary if the domain names
aren't changing. I'm guessing for listx at example.com, you could run

  bin/withlist -l -r fix_url listx_example.com -u example.com

but this may leave the list with an incorrect host_name. Maybe it's best
to not run it, do one list as a test and if things are OK, just proceed.

There is other information in the FAQ at <http://wiki.list.org/x/2oA9>
and there are other FAQs about fix_url and cPanel

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