Hello Yann,
I too think Janos' suggestions are good. From my experience in migrating
a piler instance with ~15 million mails from one vm to another I would
suggest to only move to a completely fresh machine if you don't mind a
lengthy migration process. An OS and database upgrade is in my point of
view always easier than migrating. It was a very painful process when I
did a migration from our archive.
If you want to migrate to a new machine then I can suggest to follow
roughly the following steps I you want to migrate without downtime for
your users
1. set up new machine and test if piler works correctly
2. export a sample set from you old archive (like a couple 1000 mails
for example)
3. import the sample set and make sure import, indexing and searching
works as expected
4. point your email servers at your new machine but keep it sending to
your old archive additionally
5. export all mails from your old archive
6. import all mails in your new archive
7. test if everything works correctly in the new archive
8. switch your users to the new archive
Also keep a close eye on your syslog and mail.log while importing all
mails. When I did a migration of 15 million mails I filled up the log
partition in a short amount of time which led to a crash of pilerimport.
I also had various other issues when I imported the millions of mails I
exported from the old archive because of broken headers or malformed
content leading to segfault, detection as duplicate altough they weren't
and so on. So make sure you log everythin that happens when you import a
lot messages and analyse the log to make sure every mail was correctly
imported and nothing was lost.
I have never switched a piler database from mysql to mariadb but
generally there shouldn't be any issue. Just execute mysql_upgrade after
the update and you should be good to go. Don't forget to have working
backups of course before you do anything.
Best wishes
Martin
Am 10.01.2020 um 12:43 schrieb Jason Morrill:
> I think Janos offers good thoughts.
>
> Personally I would keep the old VM running and install everything
> fresh. Then point your email servers at this new Piler VM. Next,
> either migrate info from the old system or just keep it and don't
> migrate. Of course, not migrating would mean you need to have two
> separate systems when it comes time to look for old messages.
>
> I've never performed a migration and don't know what it entails so
> perhaps it's rather painful. But from what I've seen in this forum
> Janos is very responsive with questions.
>
> Oh, and one last thought ... you could just keep the old system
> running as-is forever. Just be certain you've got it reasonably locked
> down in terms of security and access. My personal motto is "if it
> ain't broke, don't fix it" and have been running Piler since 2014 on a
> Linux box that's never seen an upgrade in 5-years.
>
> Best of luck!
>
> Jason Morrill
>
> IT Director
>
> Child and Family Agency
>
> 860-443-2896 x1422
>
> http://www.childandfamilyagency.org/
>
>
> --------
> *From:* Janos SUTO
> *Sent:* Friday, January 10, 2020 4:12 AM
> *To:* Piler User
> *Subject:* Re: Upgrade or reinstall on newer OS version ?
>
> Hello Yann,
>
> I have no experience upgrading through several LTS versions. A mysql
> -> mariadb switch should not hurt. Anyway, be sure to backup the
> database, or even better snapshot the whole vm. When the os upgrade is
> ready, be sure to recompile Piler.
>
> Be sure to stop all piler related processes even the ctontabs while
> upgrading the os.
>
> The other option could be to start a new vm with the choice of a
> recent distro with the latest master of Piler. Then export all emails
> from old server, and import to new one. This approach has the benefit
> of having everything new and up to date, however you need a lengthy
> import process.
>
> Janos
> On 10 Jan 2020, at 09:18, Yann Lehmann <mailto:arist...@free-it.ch>> wrote:
>
>
> Hello Everyone
>
> Our Piler server is doing good so far (only service on a virtual
> machine), but it is running on Ubuntu 14.04, which is no more supported.
>
> I would like to either upgrade to Ubuntu 18.04 (actual LTS, or may be
> wait some time and go to 20.04 the next LTS) or move to Debian 10. I
> know that on Ubuntu, an in place upgrade is only possible from one LTS
> version to the next, so in my case, it would be from 14.04 to 16.04, and
> then to 18.04.
>
>
> I also know that if I upgrade from Ubuntu 14.04 to 16.04, I would have
> to upgrade Mysql (or move to MariaDB) before the upgrade.
>
> What path would you advise: in place upgrade or move/reinstall on newer
> os ? And what were your experiences with in place upgrades on Ubuntu ?
>
> Thank's in advance for any advice and best regards
> Yann
>
>
>
