[Mailman-Users] Question about restoring a mailman list or two

[Mark Sapiro]

Maish Saidel-Keesing wrote:
> 
>Thank you mark for your reply.
>
>I gather that I need shell access for all of this.

Yes, you do. You might be able to restore the directories and files
with sufficient FTP access, but you'd almost certainly need shell
access anyway to fix owner/group/permission issues.

You'd definitely need shell access to use bin/arch to rebuild archives.

>I am not sure if I will be able to get it.
>
>Is there no other way to do this????

This is kind of off the wall, but if you're motivated, you could
install Python and Mailman on another machine (even your Windows
machine - at least I assume it's windows because of the notepad
reference). You wouldn't have to do a full Mailman install or worry
about MTAs - just enough to be able to run bin/config_list and
bin/list_members and maybe bin/list_owners against the list files.
This would give you the information in the config.pck files in a nice
format that you could follow for configuring the real lists manually
via the web and a nice members file you could use for a mass subscribe.

Alternatively you could do as you originally thought and just "extract"
as much as you can by hand.

The archives are still a problem. you either need to restore the whole
archive structure or you can restore just the
listname.mbox/listname.mbox file for each list and rebuild the archive
with bin/arch. There's no practical way to get the archives without
shell access or the equivalent.

Probably the easiest way to do this if you can't get shell access is to
ask the host site for a cost quote if they do it and pay the money.

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



>-----Original Message-----
>From: Mark Sapiro [mailto:msapiro at value.net] 
>Sent: Wednesday, October 13, 2004 9:11 PM
>To: Maish Saidel-Keesing; mailman-users at python.org
>Subject: Re: [Mailman-Users] Question about restoring a mailman list or two
>
>Maish Saidel-Keesing wrote:
>
>>Someone approached me and asked if I can help them restore two lists 
>>that they have.
>>
>>The mailman package was installed through CPanel (I know I am going to 
>>get a lot of answers to go to cpanel for support but I will ask it 
>>anyway)
>>
>>In the tar package that was backed up on cpanel I have some of the 
>>files that I think will be able to help me
>>
>>I just don't know how to put them back into the lists.
>>
>>What I have is the following:
>>
>>A directory called "mm" and within that directory are two more 
>>directories for each of the lists For examples sakes we will call them 
>>A & B In each of those directories I have 4 files
>>
>>Config.pck
>>Config.pck.lst
>>Pending.pck
>>Request.pck
>>
>>In the config.pck file I see (with a lot of garbage - when I opened it 
>>up in
>>notepad) the email addresses and names of the subscribers to the list 
>>(at least I think so).
>>
>>To restore it I was thinking of extracting the emails and then 
>>recreating the list and mass subscribing them again.
>>Is there a simpler way to do it??
>
>Yes.
>
>Assume $prefix is the path to the current Mailman installation.
>
>Just restore the "A" and "B" directories with their files to the directory
>$prefix/lists/
>
>If the backups were created under the same mailman version, that should be
>it, but see  $prefix/bin/check_perms --help and  $prefix/bin/update --help
>in case you might need them.
>
>>Second thing is the archives...
>>
>>I have a folder called "mma" from the cpanel backup that has the 
>>archives saved nicely in html format. How am I supposed to retrieve 
>>that back into the list current archives?
>
>The archives for a list go into the $prefix/archives/private/list-name/
>directory. If the archives are public there is also a symlink from
>$prefix/archives/public/list-name to $prefix/archives/private/list-name
>
>There is a global .mbox file in
>$prefix/archives/private/list-name.mbox/list-name.mbox
>
>If you have that, you can rebuild the archive without the other stuff.
>See:
> $prefix/bin/arch --help
>
>--
>Mark Sapiro <msapiro at value.net>       The highway is for gamblers,
>San Francisco Bay Area, California    better use your sense - B. Dylan