This weekend I migrated the university I work for to Dovecot and maildir from UW and mbox. I made some pretty significant changes to mb2md such that it converts keywords (aka, custom flags) and builds the dovecot-uidlist file based on X-IMAP/X-IMAPbase and X-UID headers. Both of these additions are optional though. I was also tasked with converting not just /var/mail/%u, but also /home/%u and all mbox folders for all of users...~30,000 people. The uidlist file it generates is for 0.99.14. I don't know if 1.0 has a different list syntax. I also added the UW uidl patch so Dovecot generates uid numbers the same way UW did. This prevented, most of, our users from noticing we even did anything (except for the 12 hour email downtime ;).
In order to convert as quickly as possible we created a wrapper around mb2md that forks mb2md processes for a list of users. The list is in a Berkeley db file. You can specify the maximum number of threads you want to use so you don't overload your system. We ran our conversion on 4 machines, converting 2 file systems (we have 8) per machine, with 32 "threads" per master converter. The backend is an EMC Celerra storage array that we read mboxes from and wrote new maildirs to. We converted all /var/mail and user folders, ~13,000,000 (yes, million) files/messages in about 3.5 to 4 hours.
If you would like the source for this system I would be happy to provide it. There is no documentation right now as it was a one time only thing, but I can try to explain. If others are interested just let me know. The whole thing is written in Perl and expects to be run as root. It chowns everything in the final steps.
Regards,
| Todd Piket | Email: todd@mtu.edu | | Programmer/Analyst | Phone: (906) 487-1720 | | Distributed Computing Services | | | Michigan Technological University | |
Netlink Tech wrote:
Hello, I have used mb2md for an individual user like this:
su ~username cd ~ ./mb2md -m
This converted /var/spool/mail/username mbox to /home/users/username/Maildir just as I expected.
To convert 100s of users the same way would be a chore (su as each user for permissions, etc.).
Is there a way to batch process all /var/spool/mail/$USER to /home/users/$USER/Maildir with the correct permissions/file owners for each user?