best practices for migrating to new dovecot version
I have a machine with my mail service on it running Debian Squeeze. The version of dovecot on that server is 1.2.15.
I'm building a new server with Ubuntu 18.04 (started with 16.04, upgraded in place), where the dovecot version is 2.2.33. I plan to migrate all my services to this new machine.
The virtual mailboxes are on disk in maildir format, with accounts in a mysql database managed by postfixadmin. When I copy them over to the new machine, would there be any value to excluding the files that dovecot creates, and letting the new version recreate them? In one mailbox here are some of the files I am considering excluding:
dovecot.index dovecot.index.cache dovecot.index.log dovecot.index.thread dovecot-keywords dovecot-uidlist dovecot-uidvalidity dovecot-uidvalidity.5876ca77
There are other files under consideration, like maildirsize and maildirfolder. One that I would be sure to *not* remove is subscriptions.
If there are recommendations about dovecot files in a maildir that should not be removed during a migration, please let me know.
I'm aware that rebuilding this information could be slow. My own personal mailbox on the system is over 8GB in size and has well over nine hundred thousand files in it.
Thanks, Shawn
Hi,
On 17 July 2018 at 22:01 Shawn Heisey <elyograg@elyograg.org> wrote:
I have a machine with my mail service on it running Debian Squeeze. The version of dovecot on that server is 1.2.15.
I'm building a new server with Ubuntu 18.04 (started with 16.04, upgraded in place), where the dovecot version is 2.2.33. I plan to migrate all my services to this new machine.
The virtual mailboxes are on disk in maildir format, with accounts in a mysql database managed by postfixadmin. When I copy them over to the new machine, would there be any value to excluding the files that dovecot creates, and letting the new version recreate them? In one mailbox here are some of the files I am considering excluding:
you can probably ignore these.
dovecot.index dovecot.index.cache dovecot.index.log dovecot.index.thread
do not ignore these
dovecot-keywords dovecot-uidlist dovecot-uidvalidity dovecot-uidvalidity.5876ca77
There are other files under consideration, like maildirsize and maildirfolder. One that I would be sure to *not* remove is subscriptions.
If there are recommendations about dovecot files in a maildir that should not be removed during a migration, please let me know.
I'm aware that rebuilding this information could be slow. My own personal mailbox on the system is over 8GB in size and has well over nine hundred thousand files in it.
You can just rsync everything over to new system.
Thanks, Shawn
On 7/17/2018 1:16 PM, Aki Tuomi wrote:
You can just rsync everything over to new system.
I did a few initial rsyncs some time ago. So a new rsync will be relatively quick. There's 25GB of data and over a million files in the copy on the new server, which is probably a few months out of date compared to the online server. The online machine is very slow and I hate asking it to calculate anything, so I don't know how much data is left to sync.
If the recommendation is to rsync everything and not exclude certain files, then I would like to ensure that dovecot rebuilds as much of its data as I can. Are there some doveadm commands I should run on the new server after the rsync and before I bring it fully online? I am OK with having a few hours of downtime if it would help dovecot make sure things are really clean.
At this time, I have not deployed Solr as the search engine for dovecot, but as I am heavily involved with that community, I probably should. If there are any guides about switching an existing setup over to Solr, please point me at them.
Thanks, Shawn
At this time, I have not deployed Solr as the search engine for dovecot, but as I am heavily involved with that community, I probably should. If there are any guides about switching an existing setup over to Solr, please point me at them. There where some links to dovecot / solr guides posted to this list in the last months. One of those helped me to switch from solr v3 to solr v7 but I don't currently recall which one. Searching the list archives should bring up those links.
Christian Kivalo
participants (4)
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Aki Tuomi
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Christian Kivalo
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Shawn Heisey
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Shawn Heisey