Abhilash Raj wrote:
On Mon, Apr 27, 2020, at 9:05 AM, Andrew Hodgson wrote:
[Moving Mailman to new server]
I did this the other week, the difference I think we've got here is that I migrated the whole instance (Mailman Core's var files plus complete Postgresql database) over to the new server rather than trying to add the lists to an existing setup, which I couldn't work out either which is what prompted me to complete the server migration before adding more lists.
The only issue I ran into was not copying the Mailman Core var files to the new server, this actually gave me a bit of trouble later on as firstly Mailman doesn't create the lists directory which is what I was checking with Exim for list existence, and also I had an issue where I was missing a moderated message from the messages directory which stopped the admin interface from displaying for that list.
var/ directory does store some state for Mailman, specifically queued messages. Optionally, also templates. Directory structure is something that could be fixed with this issue[1], but given that the messages are still stored on the >filesystem instead of database, you'd need to move var/ directory too.
I would say that the var directory structure is essential to keep if possible between servers. I don't really want to fix the issue where I couldn't access a list because of old pending messages that were no longer available. I fixed it in the end by creating pickles with the same name, and then just deleting the messages from the web interface. The problem was happening because Postorius was trying to get the list of held messages to show on the admin interface, this caused Mailman REST interface to throw an exception.
I was going to post on here but figured it out in the end.
Another issue though stemming from this is that when I was moving the data across I had several messages in the var/messages directory structure and my incorrect assumption was that they were old held messages which weren't deleted. There were around 60 messages in that folder structure and I actually only needed to recover 2 of them to get the list on track, I forgot to check that the user had cleared their held messages. Even now when I deleted the fake messages I put there in the web interface, the files are still now on the server in that structure.
Andrew.