[Mailman-Users] Backing up Mailman list installations

[Jon Carnes]

Feel free to create such a script.  It should be fairly easy - if tedious 
to do:

../bin/config_list will easily dump out the entire list configuration in 
text format, and it will also easily dump it right back into a list...

../bin/list_members will let you dump out the user lists into groups that 
recieve regular or digest mail

../bin/add_members will let you add users to a list and select whether they 
are "digest" or "regular" mail users.

And that gives you everything but the Membership options for each 
individual user: hide, nomail, ack, and notmetoo

../bin/dumpdb will let you dump out everything!  This lets you dump out the 
config of the list plus all the users and their options.  The options are 
in the section:   
  'user_options': {   'email address': option_binary,
                 'email address': option_binary, 
                 'email address': option_binary,
                   ...
The email address is followed by a number that corresponds to the options 
for the user:

  1  = nomail (+digest)
  2  = notmetoo (+digest)
  4  = ack (+digest)
  8  = plain
 16  = hide (+digest)
 ====
  9  = nomail + plain
  12 = ack + plain
  24 = hide + plain
  27 = hide + nomail + notmetoo + plain
  
Using this, you can record the users individual options.

Now here is the *hard* part (okay so it's not that easy...). The only way 
to get the options back into a database (using available tools) seems to be 
via the ../bin/withlist command.  I'll leave this to someone with more time 
to figure it out...

Jon

On Thursday 29 November 2001 09:08, Thomas T. Veldhouse wrote:
> My only problem with this is that it still leaves config.db for each list
> in a binary format.  So, I can not simply place it on a Linux platform
> and move the list from a FreeBSD platform which was running a different
> version of Python and a different version of Berkley DB.  So -- I need a
> script to extract the information from these DB files and to be able to
> reload it again.
>
> Essentially, it would be nice to have a script that was like this:
>
> % mm_bkup <listname> <filename>
> % mm_restore <listname> <filename>
>
> The <filename> would contain the archives, members, passwords, member
> settings and all list setting.  It would also be platform independent, so
> it wouldn't matter what version of Python, Berkley DB or the operation
> system mailman is running on.
>
> I don't know Python (although I do know C++ and Java quite well), and I
> really don't want to learn it for this singular use.  I was hoping
> somebody had already written such a script.
>
> Thanks in advance,
>
> Tom Veldhouse
> veldy at veldy.net
>