[Mailman-Developers] Relocating a list

[Brad Knowles]

At 8:46 AM +0100 2004-07-15, Nigel Metheringham wrote:

>  In one transition we intend to:-
>        * Move to new hardware (Original pentium to P-IV)
>        * Move to a new OS (Linux (RH7.3) to FreeBSD)
>        * Move to a new Python (1.5.2 to 2.3)
>        * Move to a new directory layout

	Out of curiosity, what version of Mailman are you running now, 
and will you be upgrading to 2.1.5?

>  In particular we would like to keep the archive URLs stable, so
>  regenerating the archives from the mboxes is not really an option
>  despite the fact it would give us slightly better handling of the few
>  attachments that have made it to the list.  [The archives have had
>  messages removed in the past so a regenerate would not keep numbering
>  stable]

	Ouch.

>  I've just been looking at Barry's notes for his list relocation at
>    http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-developers@python.org/msg03127.html

	We just moved python.org to a new machine, so perhaps this needs 
to be revisited and updated.

	I don't know the specifics for the old hardware, but the new 
hardware is not bad:

		Quad Pentium 4 XEON (2.2GHz) CPUs
		1GB of RAM
		Adaptec I2O hardware RAID controller (RAID 1)
		Ext3fs
		135GB total disk space
		1.9GB of swap

	I know we were running Exim on the old machine.  However, due to 
lack of people on the project who are sufficiently familiar with this 
program, we're instead running postfix on the new machine. 
Therefore, I can't speak for how those changes may affect things.

	We're still tuning the anti-spam settings (especially training 
the SpamBayes stuff), but what we've got now seems to be at least a 
decent starting point.  Since the machine is hosted for us by the 
very kind folks at XS4ALL, we also have the pleasure of dumping all 
outbound messages on their mail relay servers, so we don't have to 
deal with deep queues, etc....

>  Would the process detailed there work OK for this sort of move -
>  obviously I need to transfer the complete tree for a list from the old
>  machine to the new one, but thats easy enough.

	I can say that we had the new machine set up for a little while 
before we tool the old one down, so we had time to test that we had 
copied over everything correctly, or made appropriate adjustments as 
necessary.

>  The main thing I was wondering about is whether the python saved files
>  (ie the list db file etc) will transfer OK, or whether they have
>  machine/os/python-version dependencies that will preclude doing things
>  this way?

	I would be concerned about the python structures surviving such a 
big transition intact.  I'd want to have a dump of the list 
configuration in a textual form, which could then be re-imported on 
the other side.

-- 
Brad Knowles, <brad.knowles at skynet.be>

"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little
temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."

     -- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), reply of the Pennsylvania
     Assembly to the Governor, November 11, 1755

   SAGE member since 1995.  See <http://www.sage.org/> for more info.