[Mailman-Users] The perennial question: Moving lists?

[Stidd, John]

I have a different, but related question.  I need to move all of an
installation's mailing list archives to a different directory, in order to
avoid filling up a rather small volume mounted on /usr.  I tried to do this
by making $prefix/archives/private a symbolic link to the new directory, but
couldn't get Apache to accept this.  (There would be two levels of symlinks
- one from $prefix/archives/public to
$prefix/archives/private/<mailing-list>, and the other in the replacement of
the $prefix/archives/private subdirectory with the new symlink.  Apache
won't handle this even if all of the directories involved are specified with
the FollowSymLinks option.)

Another approach is to reinstall Mailman in the new directory, and move all
of the Mailman data to the new directory.  I was able to make this work,
except for the archiving of new messages.  I moved the contents of the
directories $prefix/archives, lists, and logs.  All of the symlinks in
$prefix/archives/public need to be changed to point to the new directory
(simple shellscript).  The /etc/aliases file needs to be updated, and so on.
The problem is that the original directory is also referenced numerous times
in several files in each list's archive directory
($prefix/archives/private/<mailing-list>), including pipermail.pck and the
.lock files.  There is a comment in the Pipermail code that suggests that it
can be called in a fashion that supports moving archives, but Mailman 1.1
doesn't do that, apparently.  New messages are archived in the old archive
directory, even though the PREFIX in mm_cfg.py has been updated to the new
directory.  The pipermail code retrieves the directory information from the
archive files, instead of from mm_cfg.py.

Has anyone moved Mailman/pipermail archives to a new directory?  Does
Mailman 2.x make this any easier?

Thanks,
John

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Orion (Steve Pirk) [mailto:orion at deathcon.com]
> Sent: Thursday, March 08, 2001 6:29 PM
> To: Tom Geller
> Cc: mailman-users at python.org
> Subject: Re: [Mailman-Users] The perennial question: Moving lists?
> 
> 
> The way I did it was to tar up the entire contents of
> /home/mailman making sure that file ownership and permissions
> were retained in the tar file.
> 
 . . . . .

(about moving lists to a new machine)