On 25/01/24 04:38, Bill Gee via Postfix-users wrote:
Oops! I just realized that I sent this instead of saving it. Dang!
I've re-organized the quoted section to put your questions in their
intended order.
The time is finally coming when I have to do something with my Postfix
server. I have several questions for the group.
Background - Currently I have Postfix 2.10.1 running on CentOS7. It
is rock-solid. If not for the coming EOL on CentOS7 I would leave it
alone.
Indeed CentOS 7 is very near to EOL. If you want you can upgrade CentOS
7 to the latest version of Postfix using the packages available from the
GhettoForge repositories, but I would not recommend it at this stage.
The upgrade target I have chosen is AlmaLinux 9 which packages
PostFix 3.5.9. This will be an in-place upgrade using ELevate and leapp.
Be careful with Elevate (and leapp) they are the best tool available to
do an in place upgrade, but there will almost certainly be issues with
the new system just due to the many many changes between major RHEL
releases. I've seen issues crop up from Elevate-upgraded systems years
after the upgrade. I tend to recommend doing a new install instead.
I should also note that if you're interested in features beyond postfix
3.5 (which is almost EOL itself) then you can get current postfix
packages which install on all RHEL-derived distributions (including Alma
Linux) from the GhettoForge repos.
1) Is there any documentation about moving from Postfix 2 to 3? I
looked on the web site but saw nothing obvious.
Viktor already covered the release notes. The main thing I would
recommend that you be aware of is that Postfix versions greater than 3
have support for dynamic maps. This means that packages (including Red
Hat) now require that you install separate packages for certain map
types, e.g. postfix-mysql if you want mysql support. The real upside of
this approach is that you don't end up having to install all the libs
and other deps for all the map types that you *don't* want.
2) The leapp output mentions a compatibility option. I think I need
to use that. Is there documentation on it?
This has already been well covered by Viktor.
3) Would it be useful to set up a test machine (of which I have
several) and try the configuration files on it? I think there is no
good way to actually run messages through it, but I can at least see
if the Postfix service starts.
Postfix backwards-compatibility is very good. If you change nothing in
the config odds are quite good that Postfix will still start up and run
(see the note about dynamic maps above, though). That said, it's never
a bad idea to do some testing.
> 4) Probably not a PostFix question, but it is related. One big reason
> for doing an in-place upgrade is because I do not know how to move my
> mailbox from the old server to something new. Is that just a matter of
> copying a $HOME directory?
Indeed this is more of a Dovecot question. I would recommend setting up
dovecot on the new server and copying over your mailboxes, then see if
you can log in and retrieve the mail. You may also want to take the
opportunity to convert to a new mailbox format, or locate the mailboxes
differently, which would best be done through the tools provided by
dovecot as well.
> I hate to mess with a working system. The current setup is not broken.
> The server has almost 300 days of uptime on it
The day is long gone where bragging about long uptimes is a good thing.
You should be running regular updates and rebooting after each. I
personally update servers once a month unless I deem a particular
vulnerability bad enough to do an upgrade right away.
> and has been running for
> most of ten years. Looking forward, though, I see in a year or two
> CentOS7 might become less and less usable, in much the same way that
> Windows XP is pretty much unusable now. I want to get ahead of that
curve.
Sooner than that, CentOS 7 will go EOL on 30 June of this year, so just
a few months away. CentOS 7 will not be receiving any updates after
that date.
> It is probably worth noting that I have now converted all of my CentOS
> systems except the email server to AlmaLinux 9 using ELevate. There
> were a few glitches along the way, but it did work. The converted
> systems were a mix of CentSO7, 8 Stream and 9 Stream. Only one of them
> has any significant workload (VirtualBox host). The others are all test
> beds.
Glad to hear you've upgraded nearly all of your machines, though I would
have recommended a different approach to Elevate (as stated above).
Peter
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