I’m home helping Vicki recover from her surgery. It appears to have gone well, and she’s not needing me to do much to help her – I expected her to be lying in bed all weekend weakly quavering out “bring me a cup of water, please”, but instead she’s sitting in her usual chair tapping away on her iBook.
While I’m home, though, I took the opportunity to move all my Mailman mailing lists from my home server to my linode. It was incredibly simple, if a bit time consuming. For each list, I copied over the /var/lib/mailman/lists/listname directory and the /var/lib/mailman/archives/private/listname.mbox/listname.mbox file. Then I fixed the permissions with
chown -R list.list lists/listname archives/private/listname.mbox
and fixed the internal pointers and stuff using
withlist -l -r fix_url listname
Then I trimmed down the archives (I don’t have enough room on the linode for the whole thing) using
mbox-purge --before 2004-01-01 archives/private/listname.mbox/listname.mbox
and rebuilt the archives using
su list -c "/var/lib/mailman/bin/arch listname /var/lib/mailman/archives/private/listname.mbox/listname.mbox"
and regenerated the aliases with genaliases. Then I went back to my home machine and removed the mailing lists there and put all the mailing list addresses in /etc/postfix/relocated.
Easy as pie. And now I don’t have to worry that the mailing lists will be down while we’re moving.
Best of luck for the move, I hope it’s as stress-free as possible. Can’t believe your mailing list archives took up 3Gb though… that’s a lot of text.
The above text, however, is unfortunately a tremendous example of why align:justify is not always a good thing…
Two points, Barry:
1. The archives for the lists I run were only 534M, but I didn’t want to give up the space when I could use it for better stuff. And one of the lists Vicki runs is full of people who send power point and word documents for no apparent reason.
2. Yeah, the style sheet isn’t perfect, but I didn’t write it. But I might take the hint and get rid of align:justify.
When I rule the world, PowerPoint attachments will be stripped completely, and Word attachments will be automagically converted into email body (plain) text.
When I rule the world, PowerPoint users will be put to death, and anybody sending email that isn’t plain text will be barred from using email for one year for the first offence, two years for the second, and so on.