Moving data from Cyrus 2.3.7 (RHEL) to 2.3.16 (Invoca)

[Simon Matter]

> Greetings all,

Hi John,

>
> 	We have been running Cyrus 2.3.7, as packaged by Red Hat
> (cyrus-imapd-2.3.7-2.el5) for some time, and we're upgrading to 2.3.16
> (cyrus-imapd-2.3.16-8, thanks Simon) to support replication.  We will be

You are welcome! The RHEL package is based on ours but it's a bit old now.

> deploying new servers for 2.3.16, not upgrading the existing servers.  In
> the past, we have simply rsync'd /var/spool/imap and /var/lib/imap to the
> new servers, but this doesn't seem like a good idea when dealing with
> different versions and packagings.

The good news is you should not have to worry about anything, the RPM
takes care of it automagically :)

If you are able to test things and quickly shutdown the old production
servers I tried it the following way:

1) Check /etc/imapd.conf and /etc/cyrus.conf on the old and the new
server. I think they should be identical but better look at them. And of
course also check your auth config, for example if you are running
saslauthd and such.

2) rsync -aH --delete (you may really want to sync hardlinks as well!)
/var/spool/imap and /var/lib/imap from old to new while old is running.

3) service cyrus-imapd stop on the old box so databases are in a
consistent state (and are converted to skiplist for migration if they are
not already skiplist)

4) Rerun the rsync, should go quite fast now

5) Start Cyrus on the new box and check how it works.

Please let me know if you have any problems.

Regards,
Simon