[clue-tech] CLUE Talk Mailing list mbox file too big to rsynch

[Jed S. Baer]

On Wed, 04 Feb 2009 22:49:06 -0700
David L. Anselmi wrote:

> How available to the mbox files have to be?  Some users might like to 
> download them, and there may be a link for that.  And maybe some other 
> features.
> 
> But if they are used to create the archive web pages and then ignored 
> you could split out the before '09 stuff and compress it.  Then it 
> wouldn't change so it wouldn't sync.

Well, part of me wishes I knew enough about Mailman internals to answer
that question. The other just wants an OTS remote backup that I can
install, point at the directories, and have it just work, without my
having to muck with it too much.

Mailman makes gzipped text files available for each month. They're
almost, but not quite, mbox files. Sorta scrubbed mboxes, I guess.

Anwyays, I do recall (I think correctly), that when we migrated from
machine to machine, we moved the mbox files and recreated the archives
from them. Jeff C. might remember how that went. So it seems to me that
having a backup up of them is a good belt'n'suspenders approach to being
able to recover.

I'm also thinking of just setting the dovecot service to shutdown
overnight. Might free up enough memory for the rsync to work again. That
might be as good a solution as any. Until I know more about how Mailman
uses its files (who knows when that might be), that might have to be good
enough, if it works.

Or, I can try a grand experiment -- announce to CLUE-Talk that I'm going
to muck about with it, and messages might be lost, and then split the
mbox and see what happens. I'm ideologically opposed to such an approach
on a "production" machine.

jed