Can murder be used for IMAP server migration?

[Gary Mills]

On Thu, Jan 04, 2007 at 07:47:54AM -0500, Ken Murchison wrote:
> Gary Mills wrote:
> >On Wed, Jan 03, 2007 at 08:18:15AM -0500, Ken Murchison wrote:
> >>Gary Mills wrote:
> >>>Can I use the old server as both a front end and one of the back ends
> >>>for a murder configuration, with the new server as the second back end?
> >>>Will that allow me to migrate mailboxes at my convenience?  How do I
> >>>prevent a port conflict between the IMAP server and the proxy on the
> >>>old server?
> >>You'll have to run the frontend + mupdate master on a separate machine.
> >
> >Unfortunately, all the clients know the IP address of the old server,
> 
> They actually use the IP address instead of a DNS name?

They actually use a CNAME, but the same one for SMTP and IMAP, with
the same SSL certificate for both.  It would be painful to split them
up now.

> >so the frontend has to run there.  Of course, the old IMAP server has
> >to run there too.  Is there not a way to have the old IMAP server listen
> >on different ports, so that only the frontend connects to it?  If not,
> >could it listen on a secondary IP address only?
> 
> AFAIK, the proxy is hardcoded to talk to the backend(s) on port 143. 
> Perhaps you could force imapd to only listen on localhost, but then you 
> have to find a way to get the mailboxes.db used by the proxy to use 
> localhost as the servername for the existing mailboxes.
> 
> It *might* make sense to upgrade the existing server to 2.3.x, since 
> imapd can both proxy and serve local mailboxes (a "unified" Murder).

That sounds like the way to go.  I'll investigate and try it on my
test servers.  Thanks for the suggestion.

-- 
-Gary Mills-    -Unix Support-    -U of M Academic Computing and Networking-