The mailing list for listmasters using Sympa

[Jose-Marcio Martins da Cruz <address@concealed>]

Hi,

David Verdin wrote:
> Hi Philip,
>
> That's what we think too. exactly. Hurdles included... ;)
> >  I'm specifically interested in:

Sympa migration is not really complicated but surely critical...

> > How do you manage aliases?
> You could define aliases using version 6 for some lists and leave the 
> other aliases alone.

That's an interesting point. Usually, a mailing list server needs much more outgoing MTAs 
than ingoing MTAs (the number of outgoing messages is much bigger than the number of 
ingoing messages). So, probably, you can have a single ingoing MTA, with a single aliases 
file. Well, I don't know how this was done in Sympa 6.


> >  
> >
> > I'd really like to allow some of our more experienced users to use the 
> > new
> > version for a variety of reasons (to get support personnel familiar 
> > with the
> > new version, to offer new features to those who just can't wait, 
> > etc.), but
> > I certainly can't convert our entire production instance to Sympa 6 
> > during a
> > beta release.  I'd very much like to take part in the beta testing and 
> > would
> > appreciate any advice on how to make that happen.

IMHO, the way we've allways done here to migrate sympa, is to create a copy of
the production server on another "pre-production" server, or just a test machine. This 
way, you can do near all static tests (databases, web interface, authentication, 
distribution to a test list, ...) to validate it. We've done this last month to migrate 
from Sympa 5.3.3 running under FreeBSD 6.1 to Sympa 5.4.7 under Solaris 10, and it worked 
fine. Surely, not all things can be validated this way, but most yes.

Roughly speaking, this migration is :
* rsync /home/sympa from one machine to the other
* dump sympa database (mysqldump) on the first machine and integrate it on 
the other
* get, configure, compile, install sympa on the new machine overwriting the 
older
  one
* install and configure apache in the new machine the same way as in the old 
one.

Take care with sympa spool when syncing /home sympa, so existing messages won't be 
distributed twice.

Play with the new sympa. When things are fine, stop the old installation, resync 
everything again and just start up the new sympa.

This is how we will probably do.

Regards,

Jose-Marcio



--
 ---------------------------------------------------------------
 Jose Marcio MARTINS DA CRUZ           http://j-chkmail.ensmp.fr
 Ecole des Mines de Paris
 60, bd Saint Michel                      75272 - PARIS CEDEX 06
 mailto:address@concealed