[Mailman-Users] Restoring manually backed-up archives into cPanel installation?

[Mark Sapiro]

On 1/14/19 4:02 AM, Jesse Sheidlower wrote:
> 
> I'm trying to migrate a group of Mailman lists onto a new shared hosting provider. I do not have direct access to the original system; the sysadmin there has given me a full tarball of the mailman directory, including the archives/, data/, and lists/ subdirectories.


Good.


> The new hosting provider, to which I do have command-line access via SSH, uses Mailman through a cPanel installation. There's no mailman directory currently, and cPanel itself doesn't have any options for migration. I e-mailed the support group to ask where to put it, and they said that you can only restore a backup that is itself made with cPanel into a cPanel environment; the cPanel version of mailman is different and won't accept backups made manually.
> 
> Is this true?


Yes and No.

There is some info at
<https://wiki.list.org/DOC/Mailman%20and%20CPanel>. The most important
thing is that the 'mailman' directory in cPanel is at
/usr/local/cpanel/3rdparty/mailman.

Importing archives is not a problem. Importing lists is an issue because
of cPanel's appending the domain to the internal listname, so you can't
just drop a mailman/lists/LISTNAME/config.pck into cPanel, even if yo
put it in
/usr/local/cpanel/3rdparty/mailman/lists/LISTNAME_DOMAIN/config.pck,
because the internal name in the config.pck is wrong.

I think if you have a way to import the list membership, the way to
proceed is to create the lists in cPanel and then add the members.
Extracting the members from your existing
mailman/lists/LISTNAME/config.pck file is difficult without a mailman
installation, but you might be able to just put a config.pck in
/usr/local/cpanel/3rdparty/mailman/lists/XXX/config.pck and run
/usr/local/cpanel/3rdparty/mailman/bin/list_members on the XXX list to
get files of regular members, plain digest members and mime digest
members which you can import to the real list via
/usr/local/cpanel/3rdparty/mailman/bin/add_members. Run those commands
with the --help option for details on options.

For the archives, you should be able to import them into a cPanel list
with the command '/usr/local/cpanel/3rdparty/mailman/bin/arch
LISTNAME_DOMAIN /path/to/old/archives/private/LISTNAME.mbox/LISTNAME.mbox'

Actually, you might be able to create a list in cPanel and then just
replace its lists/LISTNAME_DOMAIN/config.pck with the one from the
backup and then use /usr/local/cpanel/3rdparty/mailman/bin/withlist to
'fix' attributes like _internal_name, host_name and web_page_url, but
this probably requires some knowledge of Mailman internals and trial and
error.

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