Thanks to everyone who answered my questions about converting to a
mailstore other than traditional unix mailboxes. I started this
morning at about 2:00 and ran mixcvt on the 500 or so largest user
inboxes. Since the system was in single-user mode, I didn't have to
worry about locking.
Later this morning, I decided to convert another 4000 but rather than
trying to lock the mailboxes, I just had a script run mailutil and
create an empty MIX inbox so that the next time they checked email
the messages would get snarfed into the new INBOX. In hindsight, I
probably should not have done this since the load average went
through the roof while inboxes were being converted on-the-fly to MIX
(for anyone who is familiar with Solaris load averages, it got to 30
before it started settling back down). But even while the load
averages were high, response time for IMAP requests were far better
than before. I'm very happy I did this.
There were a couple of quirky things that happened. I'm not
necessarily looking for a fix, just documenting this for the benefit
of anyone who may consider a migration and reads this thread in the future.
For the most part this command:
mixcvt -u $user INBOX $homedir/INBOX
run as root worked nicely. However, mixcvt does not seem to
recognize mbox inboxes when run in this fashion. If someone had a
mbox file in their home directory, those messages did not get
converted. If, OTOH, we su to that user and run the command (in his
home directory) like this:
mixcvt INBOX INBOX
it does grab the mbox messages and put them in the new MIX
store. Fortunately there are only about 20 of those so I can manage
them by hand.
The other thing we noticed is that several people reported seeing
old mail (or maybe deleted mail) get downloaded again. This seems to
be the result of our running mailutil to create an empty MIX store
rather than running mixcvt. Again, not a show-stopper, just unexpected.
Per the IMAP FAQ, we did have to recompile pine with the new
c-client for the benefit of the few that use it so that it would
recognize the MIX stores.
It's 3:30 in the afternoon, and normally I would be getting calls
complaining of dropped IMAP connections and slow response
times. Haven't heard a peep today. One of my co-workers says that
before today it would take his webmail application three or four
minutes to display his inbox (if it displayed it at all) and now it
takes about 10 seconds.
The next thing I need to do is convert users' folders to
MIX. But this has gotten us over the hump. Thanks to all who
replied both on- and off-list.
Jim McCullars
University of Alabama in Huntsville
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