[ProbableSpam]Re: Cyrus upgrade, need advice

[Scott Russell]

Sun Advocate Webmaster wrote:
> I don't use sieve, and I haven't set up any sort of 'murder' 
> environment (which I am largely unfamiliar with). I don't know a lot 
> about Berkeley DB, other than it is an offline sort of database (it 
> isn't a server, but a data storage engine, for lack of better words). 
> I am not familiar with the Berkeley related commands.
>
> The SLES 10 is going on the same physical computer, and yes, it will 
> be an x86_64 build of Linux.
>
> I could re-enter the users, which isn't the worst thing... my biggest 
> concern is the mail itself (as most of our users do use IMAP).

How many users and how big is your cyrus mail store? While you're doing 
an upgrade you can still take some good steps a head of time to avoid 
serious disaster

1) If possible, copy the /var/spool/imap/ mail storage to another 
system, or another partition, that you know will not be erased during 
the upgrade. If something goes wrong you may be able to 'restore' from 
there for the mail files. Maybe you have an external USB drive you can 
hook up and use as storage?

1.5) Do the same backup for /var/lib/imap. It's not that large and it 
contains all the important databases.

2) Use ctl_mailbox to dump flatfile version of your mailbox.db file. 
This is critical. Keep a copy of it somewhere else. It is small. Put it 
on a USB thumb drive if you have to or just mail it to your home account.

3) Before doing the update make a tgz backup of /etc/. It's always handy 
to refer to 'old config files' before an upgrade gets a hold of them.

4) Make sure your postfix queue is empty before shutting down the 
system. Use the mailq command to check.

5) Before updating, become failure with cyrus command cvt_cyrusdb(8) and 
berkleydb commands db_checkpoint and db_recover. These should be safe to 
play with on copies of your data and will be helpful after the upgrade 
if something goes unexpected or you change storage formats.

Good Luck!

-- 
Scott Russell <lnxgeek at us.ibm.com>
IBM Linux Technology Center, System Admin