On 2025-02-20 07:15:57 +0000 (+0000), Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
[...]
> I've done two massive migrations in the last year.  In the first (~20k
> lists), the lists were down for maybe two hours, but it took 22 hours
> for HyperKitty to populate, mostly in Xapian indexing we realized in
> post-mortem analysis.  In the second (~1k lists), no perceptible
> downtime because they have their own bespoke archiver that has a
> list-manager-agnostic API.

Our sites didn't have nearly that many mailing lists, but we were
migrating from multiple side-by-side MM2 installs for domains hosted
on one server to a multi-domain MM3 deployment on another. In our
case we did piecemeal outages one domain at a time rather than
having one mass migration for everything all at once, and that kept
the impact to each individual domain/site minimal.

> The trick to zero delivery downtime is that you can configure your MTA
> to route to Mailman 3 if the list exists there, if not route to
> Mailman 2 if the list exists there, and if not continue to any lower
> priority routes.  It worked as designed (mops sweat off brow ;-).  We
> did take Postorius and the Mailman 2 management CGIs and email command
> addresses offline for the duration (3 hours in the first case, 30
> mminutes in the second).  This is sraightforward if Mailman 2 and
> Mailman 3 are running on the same host.  Life is more complex if
> you're spinning up Mailman 3 in a separate node but it should be
> possible.

Yes, our downtime included finalizing a warmed rsync over the
Internet and waiting for DNS changes to propagate (we tried to time
things so that the import occurred in parallel with DNS settling
out, even with lowered TTLs it helped some for larger sites). We
didn't have a lot of incentive to avoid downtime entirely in that
situation, and instead just warned the various communities in
advance when we'd scheduled their particular migration for and what
they should expect. We relied primarily on delivery deferrals
between taking a domain offline on one server and bringing up the
imported copy on the other, and just accepted that the associated
Web content would be offline during the maintenance window but that
posts anyone sent at that time would still make it to the lists once
they were back.

> I think if you're migrating to HyperKitty you can speed up the
> migration by shutting off indexing, and doing that later at the cost
> of confusing people who expect the lists to be indexed.  I'm not sure
> if it's possible to migrate the archives concurrently with accepting
> new posts, or maybe to migrate archives in advance and backfill any
> posts that arrive during the list migration.  And there's no reason
> why you can't leave the legacy Mailman 2 archives up for browsing
> as a backup for as long as needed.

In our case, "as long as needed" is approximately forever, but we
did install some redirects in Apache for things like list info pages
and archive roots. We drew the line at trying to develop an
automated mapping to redirect individual posts in the archives
though, which is the main reason we keep the pre-migration pipermail
content around, since we'd rather not break random links elsewhere
on the Web, e.g. in news articles that link to list discussions.
-- 
Jeremy Stanley

Attachment: signature.asc
Description: PGP signature

_______________________________________________
Mailman-users mailing list -- mailman-users@mailman3.org
To unsubscribe send an email to mailman-users-le...@mailman3.org
https://lists.mailman3.org/mailman3/lists/mailman-users.mailman3.org/
Archived at: 
https://lists.mailman3.org/archives/list/mailman-users@mailman3.org/message/JVT3N7CAP6SF4H5IR3G2FKFYC7XN7KQA/

This message sent to arch...@mail-archive.com

Reply via email to