Multi-server consolidation

[Gary W. Smith]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Bron Gondwana [mailto:brong at fastmail.fm]
> Sent: Tuesday, February 03, 2009 7:02 PM
> To: Gary W. Smith
> Cc: info-cyrus at lists.andrew.cmu.edu
> Subject: Re: Multi-server consolidation
> 
> 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.

I'll look into that.  It sounds like what we want to do.  Stopping MTA's
aren't a problem since it all goes through a central relay at this point
in time (plus we have a 4 hour window every week for taking systems down
if necessary).

Gary