Multi-server consolidation

[Bron Gondwana]

On Tue, Feb 03, 2009 at 03:16:55PM -0800, Gary W. Smith wrote:
> I have a couple different servers that have several mailboxes on them
> and I would like to migrate them to a single new server.  The new server
> will handle all of these mailboxes just fine.  All of the mailboxes are
> unique across all of the servers.
> 
> I have copied the /var/[spool/lib]/imap to the new server from one box
> and everything seems to be working fine there.  Now it's the issue of
> getting the rest of the mailboxes over to the new machine.  There are 4
> machines in total with about 2000 email accounts.  
> 
> I'd prefer not to use any type of imap copy as we want to preserve the
> flags and we don't have the luxury of changing the user passwords.
> 
> Any suggestions?

Replication engine :)

Seriously, that's how we do it.  Run up a sync_server on the new machine
and then sync_client -U each user from the old machine.

Obviously, you'll want to suspend delivery and stop IMAP clients for the
duration.  We do this with some dastardly hacks in the authentication
daemon, a database field that our internal tools check before trying
to deliver, and a "grep $UserName $confdir/proc/* | xargs kill" moral
equivalent.  You can probably manage with just removing the imapd and
lmtp lines from your cyrus.conf and doing it outside regular hours
though.

Bron.