Topic: Migrate users/settings to new machine.

[stdean]

I've searched on this one and have not been able to find a solid answer.

I'm currently running SME 7.1 as a mail server for my company. We have around 70+ mail accounts. We're building a new machine at the moment which will replace the current server. Is there any way to 'easily' move the existing mail accounts from the old server to the new server other than re-creating the accounts by hand in the server-manager.

I've seen it mentioned on another thread from 1 or 2 years ago that you could extract the user and groups from the /etc/passwd and /etc/group files and then copy the user directories over from the old machine. I've tested this out and while the account will be created and the mail will be present in the account, I am unable to view the users in the server-manager.

Is there some other values/files I need to extract from the old server?

If I could just recreate the users and their mail dirs it would be a great help, I'm not too worried about having to re-set the quotas or pseudonyms (I'm willing to spend a couple of hours updating them).

Any help/ideas would be appreciated.

Conor

[raem]

stdean

This should help.
http://wiki.contribs.org/Backup_server_config

You can transfer the whole server config, including users & ibays, passwords, machine accounts & so on, but without the data or users emails, if that's how you want to do it.

[stdean]

That looks ideal. The only problem I would have with that approach is that this is a production mail server. Do you have any experience of doing this on a live server. I can see problems occurring with incoming mails or something while I've moved the user folders over to a temp directory.

I'm currently dealing with about 60+GB of mails, how long does the backup process usually take? I can probably afford 5 or 10 mins downtime, but I wouldn't feel too comfortable with anything more (we operate pretty much 24/7 so there's not much chance of doing it on a Saturday afternoon).

Conor

[greg]

Hi,

Have you tried this: http://forums.contribs.org/index.php?topic=32522.0;topicseen  ?
I have used it for SME7 recently, although it was originally designed for SME5.6 . Remember to add /etc/samba/secrets.tdb . This caused some problems for me.

Alternatively, you can use AFFA:
http://wiki.contribs.org/affa
That is also a very efficient backup system that works fine.

Hope this helps..

/Greg

[mmccarn]

Affa will let you move to new hardware with minimum down-time.  Here's a howto: http://wiki.contribs.org/Moving_SME_to_new_Hardware

[kryptos]

Hi,

You could try lazy admin tool and imapcopy.Just a try but don't how long would it take for 60+ gb emails. But it's faster than recreating by hand.


Regards,
Rocel

[stdean]

Just a short update, I've tested out affa on a dummy server and it does exactly what I'm looking for. This is a pretty amazing tool.

Before for backing up mail I've just been rsyncing the mail to a remote machine, I think I'm going to be using affa from here on in.

I'll be running it on the live server over the weekend, I'll post an update with how long it takes to get all 60GBs of mail down when I'm done.

Conor