[Mailman-Users] Migration of old debian woody mailman server

[Andrew Hodgson]

Peter Merritt wrote:

>I have to migrate a dead mailman server running on debian woody to a new Ubuntu server. The drive failed and I was able to image the drive to >a new drive but mailman will not run, seems that their is significant problems with the current mailman installation. All the commands seem >die with python tracebacks. The data directories for mailman seen to be OK. I did some research on moving a list to a new server an it seems >reasonably easy. But I am concerned about moving from an older version of mailman to a newer version. Additionally, I am going to use postfix >for the mta, the old server is using exim. I also notice postgres running on the old server and wonder if exim/mailman could be using to for >management. I did not have time to fully research the setup, its been running unattended for 8+ years.  I am looking for input about possible >pitfalls and ideas to make this go easier Any help would be greatly appreciated. 

This isn't an exhaustive list of things you will need to do but will go some way towards it:

You definitely need the files in /var/lib/mailman/archives, and /var/lib/mailman/lists.  When you install a new Mailman version, copy those directories over the top, then run check_perms as root, followed by the update command to get the lists config files updated to the new version.  You will need to look at the /etc/mailman/mm_cfg.py file and merge changes from the old installation, namely for the hostnames/URL patterns etc.  Once you get some of the mailman commands running without errors, its time to configure Postfix and Apache to talk to the new installation.

Let us know how that goes.
Andrew.