Moving mbox formatted mailboxes
I am going to move 400+ mbox formatted mailboxes on a postfix mail server.
If that is not enough make it 40.000 mailboxes ;-)
I have basically 2 identical mail servers at hand. Same user accounts, software setup etc.
Currently Server A is the "real" mail server while Server B is a backup server.
I was asked to move the Server A from the current location A to a datacenter while providing the least possible downtime & making all mboxes accessable at "all" times.
My first idea was as following:
Pattern A)
- stop incoming queues on Server A and B and set temp. unavailable message on Server A (451)
- Copy all mboxes over to Server B + test them
- Switch Network cable to server B
- Start incoming queue on server B
- take Server A down and move it
... move Server A ...
- Setup of Server A at datacenter
- Stop incoming queue on Server B and set temp. unavailable message on Server B (451)
- Copy mboxes back from Server B to A + test them
- Start incoming queue on Server A
- Switch DNS to Server A's new IP
- activate portforwarding on server B until the DNS went through
Pattern B)
I was also thinking about using something like procmail/formail and keeping a mail copy while forwarding it to a second mail server.
That would more or less allow to have the messages on both servers.
Not sure how I would do the forwarding yet though.
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Does anybody have any other / better ideas ?
I would appreciate any replies.
Note: Again, the messages are formatted in a mbox format NOT Maildir format (unfortunately)
Best regards
