[afnog] summary document mailman cross-server move

[Hervey Allen]

Brian Candler wrote:

> Thanks for documenting this. A few comments:
> 

A pleasure.

> (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.
> 

Good point. I'll make a note in the document about this.

> (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 :-)
> 

I wasn't in charge of the server's original software 
configuration or the long-term admin of the box, thus the 
configuration was inherited.

> (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.
> 

Nice! I'll note this in the document.

Basically, considering the amount of traffic I decided we 
could get away with doing things as we did. Missed posts 
(i.e. to the archives) and/or subscription requests would be 
low enough that I could deal with them. In the end we didn't 
miss any posts or subscription/drop requests.

> (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.
> 

Ayitey switched the mx record for afnog.org back to 8 hours 
earlier today (Monday). The change should start appearing soon.

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

Thank you Brian!

Cheers,
	- Hervey