Possible List Downtime

[Jay West]

There is a chance (homelife schedule permitting) that I will be moving the 
drives from the temp classiccmp server to the new (old) classiccmp server 
this weekend. If I do get around to it, it would be during the day - 
slightly more likely sunday than saturday. Then again, I may not get to it 
at all this weekend. We'll see. Wanted to give a heads up in any case.

When I do this, the list will be down for an hour or so if all goes well. If 
it doesn't go well.... could be much longer :)

Bear in mind a few things:

1) There WILL be bumps. There is at least 63 separate software packages that 
are installed & configured on the server that provides the classiccmp 
services. You can bet that I (and YOU) will find snags and things will be 
broken for a bit (days or weeks afterwards, depending on urgency and my 
ability to fix). Some of the packages have been tested thoroughly, some of 
them I simply cant really test until they go live. You can expect some 
problems.

2) When I moved subscriber lists from the old server to the new server a few 
weeks ago, there is one setting that mailman doesn't migrate with subscriber 
export/import - the "no mail" flag that many of you use. So if you subscribe 
to both lists (silly) or have your account temporarily set to "no mail" 
you'll start getting mail to both until you go back and set your no mail 
flag. I'm not going through 1000 accounts individually by hand to preserve 
the nomail flag.

3) Mailman also doesn't transfer passwords it would appear. I will try to 
remember to force mailman to send out a password reminder after the upgrade, 
so hopefully you'll get your mailman password sent via email. I may forget 
to do this, I'm a forgetfull guy. Give me a shout if you get stuck.

4) There are a lot of classic computer related websites that I host on the 
classiccmp server for people at no charge. It is entirely likely that during 
this time period of being "half on one server, half on another"... that 
files & content you put on your website went to the wrong server and you'd 
notice it after the switch. If so, give me a shout and I'll get the content 
fixed for you. If the files are on one of the two servers, it's a lot faster 
for me to copy them than for you to reupload them. The "old" drive will be 
put up in a different machine on the same network, so I will be able to copy 
stuff easily that got stranded. Keep your shirt on. See #1 above.

5) Many chunks of the archives have been located on the drive. However, I am 
sure there are holes of missing posts. This really torques me off. Someone 
who did list maintenance before me had moved the defacto copy of the list 
archives into a different spot on the server and I didn't realize they were 
in an area I routinely mess up and later clean up. It's possible I deleted 
them, but in any case I can't find them. Again, many of them have been 
located but not all. After I finish the server drive migration, I will be 
regenning all the html archives from scratch - going against the original 
mbox files. If there's any posts in the archives that you want me to remove 
(from time to time someone posts their home address by mistake, etc etc.) 
now is the time to let me know and I'll clean the archives. After the 
archives are completely reassembled, you can be damn sure I will be copying 
them to DVD and sticking a copy in my vault off-site.

6) The newer version of mailman has a pretty much revamped logic for 
handling bounces and automatic subscription disables due to bounces. It will 
be interesting to see how that part works.

Regards,

Jay West