[afnog] summary document mailman cross-server move

[Brian Candler]

On Mon, Aug 07, 2006 at 02:55:42PM -0400, Hervey Allen wrote:
> I've created a document that describes the details of moving 
> the afnog at afnog.org mailing list from one server to another. 
> Getting the steps right required a few iterations.
> 
> If anyone has suggestions about doing this differently I 
> think that could be useful information for the list.
> 
> The document is here:
> 
> http://nsrc.org/helpdesk/mailman-move.html

Thanks for documenting this. A few comments:

(1) The machine's hostname, "afnog.org" is functional, but not particularly
descriptive. It seems to imply that this domain will never have another
server. However, a name's just a name, and I shouldn't really read any more
into it than that.

(2) Interesting choice of Fedora Core 5, as it's something we've been
telling students not to use if they want a "stable" platform. There are some
free stable Red Hat variants available now - e.g. CentOS - which might have
been worth considering.

(3) Interesting choice of Sendmail, as we've been telling students to avoid
that too :-)

(4) "it was not possible to turn off incoming mail for the Ugandan servers"
- well it probably was, but maybe just a little difficult. Even if the
server is shared with other domains, there are things you can do to force a
4xx temporary failure for all incoming deliveries to particular mailboxes,
which is all you want really - i.e. force the sender to retry later.

Pointing the mailbox at a directory where the user has no rights to create
files is a good one.

(5) The job's not quite complete, since the afnog.org MX record still has a
300 second TTL. The A record for the server name, afnog.org, also has a 300
second TTL, and I don't think that was ever needed, but it seems the whole
zone file has had its default set to 300, because www.afnog.org has that
too.

But anyway, my policy quibbles aside, thanks again for writing this up in
some detail.

Regards,

Brian.