moving mailboxes between partitions

[Rob Siemborski]

On Wed, 18 Sep 2002, Andreas Piesk wrote:

> i want to move mailboxes from 4 different partitions into one.
> AFAIR i have to use the cyradm-command 'rename':
>
> rename user.name1 user.name1 newpartition
>
> it works so far, on a testserver.
> before i run the prepared scripts on the productionserver with approx.
> 8800 mailboxes i think asking the gurus might be a good idea :)

This should be fine.  We've done it several times in bulk at CMU.

> is the 'rename'-method safe? did anyone such an operation before (hardly
> to believe that i'm the first:). should i slowdown the script or could
> it running at full speed? must i run a reconstruct afterwards?

The 'rename' method is safe, but it isn't atomic.  That is, sub-mailboxes
can fail and not affect the rest of the move.  The IMAP server should
report an untagged NO for each failure.

Generally, though, this isn't an issue.

I *would* be wary about running bulk renames on IMAP servers before 2.1.4.
These locked the mailbox list for the entire duration of the rename,
basically preventing any other operation from occuring on the server.
2.1.4 and higher (especially 2.1.6 and up) correct this behavior to be a
bit less draconian about the locking, at the expense of more mailboxes.db
transactions.

-Rob

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Rob Siemborski * Andrew Systems Group * Cyert Hall 207 * 412-268-7456
Research Systems Programmer * /usr/contributed Gatekeeper