Topic: migrating email help 4.1.2 to 5.6

[Max]

I am interested in migrating my companies email server from 4.1.2 to 5.6.
A lot of my users are on IMAP and thus all of their mail is on the server. I need to save this mail when I migrate.

My question is: is there any easy way to migrate account names and settings and email? or do I have to do it all by hand? and if I have to do it all by hand is there going to be any problem with copying all the files from /home/e-smith/files/users/$username/* to the new server, same place?

I have about 70 accounts to do so any help would be greatly appreciated.
I figure I can automate some of it in perl but I am not sure what all I have to watch out for.

-Max

[guestHH]

as far as i know a 'migration' would go fully automatically, but...

Since you come from a _very_ old not supported version I would bet on it. Make a backup to desktop first _and_ make a manual backup by using tar. (see tar options to compress files and maintain rights!)

After the migration you are still able to recover from a 'bad' situation. Look in these forums for how to exclude directories from the standard backup so you have at least the user accounts.

my 2cents and good luck

Regards,
guestHH

[Dan Brown]

Well, installing 5.6 as an Upgrade would be the easiest way to do what you're looking for.  Otherwise, run a web backup/restore, which will (or should, at least) restore all users and e-mail.

[Max]

Thanks for the quick response and all the help.
The old machine is installed onto a system with a 3ware RAID card in it which has been giving me nothing but trouble. As a matter of fact I have several systems out in the field with 3ware cards and they are always acting up... So this new server is on completely new hardware and therefore I cannot do a straight upgrade.

I had assumed that I could not do a backup from 4.1.2 and restore to a 5.6, am I wrong in thinking that?

That would be the easiest route for me so I guess I will try that first. The only other problem is there are a lot of custom mods and data on my original server (none of which I need) but the backup size is 14 Gig! Hopefully I can cut that down to 5-10 Gig, but is that going to be a problem? Assuming I can handle it on the desktop side, I seem to recall a problem with files larger then 2 gig under linux.

-Max

[Jeroen]

You could of course first move the data in the ibays out to a workstation, and then do the backup to desktop.

jeroen

[Max]

Yup, thanks all. It looks like after I do some cleanup and moving I will only have around a 600 Meg backup.

So just to be clear though. When I do a backup to desktop, its not going to pull the backup path(s) from /etc/flexbackup.conf it pulls from @directories in /etc/e-smith/web/panels/manager/cgi-bin/backup

is that correct?

[greg allt]

One thing you can do is use ghost to create a ghost image of your current setup and then restore that to the new system.

From there you can do the upgrade with the hardware you want the server to run on.

I did this recently with great success.

Another time I tried this the new machine has some problems with the hardware.  The new computer wouldn't boot so when I was done I had to "refresh" the files by doing an "upgrade".  

To do this, I left the CD in and booted and told the system I was updating an existing server (even though I used the same version as was running on it).  You might be able to directly upgrade to the version you want, I don't know and it is not a big deal if you still have the old computer.  If things don't work the way you want, try again.

I think the new server had a different chipset from the other computer and didn't get some of the proper binaries installed.  When I did the upgrade, everything went fine and I was able to boot the computer again.

Max wrote:
>
> Yup, thanks all. It looks like after I do some cleanup and
> moving I will only have around a 600 Meg backup.
>
> So just to be clear though. When I do a backup to desktop,
> its not going to pull the backup path(s) from
> /etc/flexbackup.conf it pulls from @directories in
> /etc/e-smith/web/panels/manager/cgi-bin/backup
>
> is that correct?

[greg allt]

One thing you can do is use ghost to create a ghost image of your current setup and then restore that to the new system.

From there you can do the upgrade with the hardware you want the server to run on.

I did this recently with great success.

Another time I tried this the new machine has some problems with the hardware.  The new computer wouldn't boot so when I was done I had to "refresh" the files by doing an "upgrade".  

To do this, I left the CD in and booted and told the system I was updating an existing server (even though I used the same version as was running on it).  You might be able to directly upgrade to the version you want, I don't know and it is not a big deal if you still have the old computer.  If things don't work the way you want, try again.

I think the new server had a different chipset from the other computer and didn't get some of the proper binaries installed.  When I did the upgrade, everything went fine and I was able to boot the computer again.Max wrote:
>
> Yup, thanks all. It looks like after I do some cleanup and
> moving I will only have around a 600 Meg backup.
>
> So just to be clear though. When I do a backup to desktop,
> its not going to pull the backup path(s) from
> /etc/flexbackup.conf it pulls from @directories in
> /etc/e-smith/web/panels/manager/cgi-bin/backup
>
> is that correct?

[Ray Mitchell]

Dear Max

> I had assumed that I could not do a backup from 4.1.2 and restore to a 5.6, am I > wrong in thinking that?

I'm fairly sure that is supported by sme (I read it or was told), I know that 5.5 will restore from 4.1.2 so 5.6 should be OK.

> That would be the easiest route for me so I guess I will try that first. The only
> other problem is there are a lot of custom mods and data on my original server
> (none of which I need.....

If you don't need any of the old "mods", then no problem, BUT, if you want to keep some things then any custom mods will need to be redone on the new server, and any additional rpms that you installed will also have to be reinstalled on the new server.
Note that quite a bit has changed from v4.1.2 to v5.6 so a lot of older rpms do not work correctly on 5.6. Having said that it looks like all the great developers have done a good job of updating/renewing their rpms to work on 5.6.
The firewall rules are quite different on 5.6.

The backup to desktop function will retain all the paths and restore to the same locations quite OK, but you must keep your backup file less than 2Gb. Alternatively use backup2ws by Darrell May, as you can split the backup to less than 2Gb chunks, not sure if it works on v4.1.2 though. If you only have 600Mb you should be OK with the standard backup to desktop, just make sure you Verify your backup file.

As you have new hardware it would be better to do a straight clean install of v5.6 only, apply the latest update4 and then run your Restore. It should be OK that way.

Regards
Ray Mitchell

[Kelvin]

Max,

I would actually take a more gradual approach. In the past I've often come across problems when upgrading 4.1.2 directly to 5.1.2 let alone 5.6. However, upgrading to 5.0 first then 5.1.2 generally has less if any problems. When I recently upgraded 2 sites from 5.0 to 5.6, I again took them in steps, ie. first upgrade to 5.1.2 (I never did use 5.5, ever), then to 5.6. Works fine. However, as these are other peoples servers we're talking about here, I took backups at every step.

Kelvin

[Michael Soulier]

Max wrote:
>
> I had assumed that I could not do a backup from 4.1.2 and
> restore to a 5.6, am I wrong in thinking that?

I wouldn't. A great deal has changed since 4.1.2, and you would be restoring 4.1.2 db files onto a 5.6 system. I would be very selective in your restore, that's a big leap of versions you're taking.

Mike