migrating Cyrus IMAPd from i386 to amd64 system

[Gary Smith]

> I'm currently running Cyrus IMAPd 2.2.13p1 on NetBSD/i386 without any
> problems.  During the next few days I need to move the users' mailboxes
> to a NetBSD/amd64 system which will run Cyrus IMAPd 2.3.16.  Some hints
> about this would be appreciated.
> 
> The cleanest way would probably be to get Cyrus IMAPd running on the
> new
> system and then to copy the mailboxes via IMAP (using imapsync(1) or
> similar); but since the upstream on the old system is very slow I'd
> like
> to avoid this approach if possible.
> 
> Since I can afford some hours of mail system downtime I'd prefer to
> copy
> over a compressed archive containing all the mailboxes, extract it on
> the new system and recursively run reconstruct(8) for all mailboxes;
> then I'd probably copy over the contents of $configdirectory/user/ and
> start Cyrus IMAPd.  Does this make sense?  And what data will I be
> missing? ;-)
> 
> Some basic questions:
> 
> - Is Cyrus on amd64 able to read skiplist files created by Cyrus on
>   i386?  (If not, I'd probably have to use cvt_cyrusdb(8) to dump and
>   restore the relevant files.)
> 
> - What about the cyrus.{cache,header,index,squat} files?  Can I expect
>   Cyrus on amd64 to be able to read them just fine?  (This seems not to
>   be that important since those files are easily recreated IIUC.)
> 


YMMV, but here is what I have done in the past.  From the destination, I rsync the source to get the bulk of the files over.  Granted, this isn't a working copy when you're finished but it will cut down on the copy time.  Then I shutdown all of the cyrus services and then do a final rsync to get everything else (including the core DB files).  Just make sure that everything is stopped when you make that final copy.

Then start it up and test...  I believe we did this from i386 to x86_64, but I can't remember as most of our mail VM's are on i386 again (vmware on some good, but non VT enabled hardware).