Re: [Exim] HI. Swapping mail servers.

On Fri, Nov 23, 2001 at 10:19:13AM -0800, Derrick wrote:
>I am about to swap in a new mail server, so I can rebuild the current one.
>I'm wondering if I can get some suggestions how to do this with minimal
>downtime.. One thing I thought of was setting the current box (#1) to
>queue_only and have no queue running for a bit, then move in the new box
>(#2) with the IP of #1, and set #2 to queue_only and then on #1 is FTP
>over my /var/mail/ directory to #2, then somehow (suggestions on this
>please - would I do a smarthost on #1?) send all the mail in queue from #1
>to #2, and then set #2 to deliver normally.
>
>Make sense? Sound like a reasonable way to do this?

Possible, but it sounds like a lot of work. What I did for my recent
mail-server migration was:

- set up newbox to do oldbox's job;
- point MX records to newbox (which will take time to propagate, of
course);
- set up on oldbox:
relay_domains = all the things that used to be local_domains
local_domains = localhost (for debugging)

and first router:

smarthost:
driver = domainlist
transport = remote_smtp
route_list = "* newbox byname"

- shift user mailboxes from oldbox to newbox (using scp, in this case,
then mutt to combine them to save my having to think about the locking);

- once the MX records have had time to propagate and oldbox is no longer
receiving mail at all, turn it off.

Roger