[Dovecot] Experience moving mailboxes from Dovecot 0.99.14 to Dovecot 1.07 => Improvement possible

[Eric Rostetter]

Quoting Charles Marcus <CMarcus at Media-Brokers.com>:

> On 8/6/2008, Eric Rostetter (rostetter at mail.utexas.edu) wrote:
>> Anyone know about Dovecot 1.1.x rpms for Centos/RHEL 3.x?
>
> I'd be more interested in upgrading the server to a reasonably  
> recent version of the distro...

Unfortunately, it isn't a redundant setup, so an upgrade is downtime.

I've thought about doing an on-line (e.g., yum) upgrade from 3 to 4,
but I'm not sure 4 would qualify as "reasonably recent" and it would
still require a reboot, but this is an option and would get me the
new dovecot rpms at least...

Since there is no good way to do an on-line upgrade from CentOS/RHEL 3
to CentOS/RHEL 5, that isn't really an option at this time (too much
downtime).

I've also had machines that were hardware frozen at older OS versions...
Though that is not the case in this instance (was for my print server
I had to recently deal with).

> This is one huge reason why I like gentoo so much.

It has nothing to do with gentoo, IMHO.

> As long as I update it regularly, I never have to worry about a  
> massive update that breaks everything.

Same can be said for most distros, but I can't afford the downtime of
the constant upgrades which mean constant reboots...  That is why
people pick a "enterprise" solution like RHEL/CentOS, so they can have
better uptime (with support) than a non-enterprise systems...
I regularly have machines with 2 or 3 years of uptime before I need
to reboot them for an upgrade (they are behind firewalls, in case
you wonder how I get along on such old kernels).

Obviously, RHEL/CentOS 3.x will end of life, and I'll need to upgrade
eventually because of that, but the more I can put it off, then better...
But sometimes you just need to bite the bullet, and that day may be close
at hand for this server...

Or, I can just roll my own RHEL/CentOS 3 rpm package also... :)  Which
is less work than an OS upgrade at least...

> Best regards,
>
> Charles

-- 
Eric Rostetter
The Department of Physics
The University of Texas at Austin

Go Longhorns!