Procedure for moving Scalix to new server.

[hkphooey]

Hi.
I've been fighting a battle with a number of mail delivery problems over the last couple of months, so I've decided the best idea is to start fresh.

I've got a new server set up and I'm about to install 11.0.4 on it (the old server is running 11.0.3)

What is the procedure for transferring the mail store over?
- Do I just transfer the scalix directory over, or do I use the backups created with the backup script? i.e UserName.tar.gz

- If its the former, I'm guessing it would go like this
a) Install the new server
b) Stop the old server
c) Transfer the directory across
d) Stop the new server
e) Replace the data directory
f) Start the new server

Do I have to recreate the user accounts first before I do this? Or is that information included in the data store?

Does the mailnode name have to be the same? Ideally I'd like to run one as mail.domain.com and one as mail2.domain.com until we've tested them. Should I even be thinking of doing this?

Maybe this is all addressed in a document somewhere, but I'm searching for the wrong terms. migrate, migration, restore don't really point me to anything useful.

[ScalixSupport]

Hi!

Is the backup you created is for for /var/opt/scalix? If so, we would be using this backup to
restore Scalix Server on the new machine.

Thanks,
Subir

[hkphooey]

Yes I have a backup of /var/opt/scalix. I also have a backup created by squirting each of the users mailboxes out to a tar.gz file using the omcpoutu command. So my question is really which of these methods is best?

If I use the /var/opt/scalix method, do I put the directory in place first and then install scalix, or vice versa?

If I use the /var/opt/scalix method, do I have to keep the mailnode name the same? In which case I might like to use hte omcpinu import (there are only ten users, so this might be an option).

I'm just looking for some guidance here. If everyone chips in here, I'll even summarise and make a wiki page to fill the gap in the documentation.

[ScalixSupport]

Hi!

Hostname should be the same in both cases as users might be having mails in their
mailboxes, their mail ids and reply to addresses, mailnodes, mailnode mapping are all on the
basis of Scalix Server FQDN, what I would suggest is, untar the backup of /var/opt/scalix
and try the installation, this would restore the message store.

Make sure that the new server has hostname and IP address same as the one that existed
in the previous server.

Thanks,
Subir

[hkphooey]

OK, so given the fact that I'm setting up this server on a different hostname (mail2.mydomain.com rather than mail.mydomain.com) and also that the IP address will be different, I gather (?) that the option of restoring the /var/opt/scalix directory is the WRONG option.

So what I should do in that case is to
- install scalix latest version on the new server, set up as mail2.mydomain.com
- Set up identically named accounts on the new server.
- shut down the old server and make backups of the old accounts.
- Take the backups of the individual mail accounts and transfer them to the new server
- Import them one by one into the new mail server
- Set up forwarding rules etc as required.
- start up the new server
- point the MX record to the new server.

We can afford a few hours of downtime, so this seems to be the best option. Any comments on this?

Gradually negotiating through the minefield.

[Shredder]

If you are shutting down the old server, what is the problem with having the new server as the same name?

You can 2 machines with the same name on a network. DNS will only point to the one that is listed.

I would shutdown the old server scalix services (omshut -t3), then copy over the data to the new machine. Restart the scalix services on the old one (omrc). Then on the new one, install Scalix and test that everything seems to be working (ie all users are there. You can access mail, etc.)

Then when you want to do the final changeover, shutdown the services on the old server, sync the data, then bring up the services on the new server and away you go.

Shredder

[hkphooey]

Thanks Shredder.

The reason I thought I couldn't copy the /var/opt/scalix data directory across directly is because according to the Scalix Support posting above, I need to

Make sure that the new server has hostname and IP address same as the one that existed in the previous server.

I don't have any control over the IP address as all this is happening in a datacentre 2000 miles away, and the server has been moved to a different segment. I think I'm going to have to continue with my two parallel servers idea. The data import process only seems to take a few minutes per user, and there are only ten users, so I think this is how I'm going to do it.

But thanks for you input anyway. This is a confusing topic and the information is not straightforward. I'll write up the two options into a wiki page when I'm done.

[hkphooey]

I have another question about migrating servers. I've managed to transfer all the emails across using the omcpoutu and omcpinu commands as detailed above. Then I manually set up all the forwarding rules with sxaa.

All good so far, except the public folders haven't copied across. How do I move those across? All I can think of is to connect to the old server with the outlook connector, copy the folders locally over IMAP and then copy them onto the new server. There must be a better way than this though?

[btisdall]

If you're on v11 then you should use sxmboxexp/sxmboximp. They will dump & restore public folders, also preserving rules for user mailboxes.