4.14. How do I upgrade from Mailman 2.0.x to Mailman 2.0.y

Unfortunately you do require a little downtime for this, however it should be measured in single digit minutes, possibly less:

1) Retrieve the sources for the new Mailman. eg

    $ snarf http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/mailman/mailman-2.0.10.tgz

2) Follow the instructions for building Mailman exactly all the way up the point of installing it, but DO NOT install it. You can find the ./configure line you used last time by looking in the config.status file in old source tree.

2a) You may want to make a backup of your current installation, e.g. by doing a "tar cvf - /home/mailman | gzip -c -9 > mymmbackup.tgz".

3)Stop the following daemons: MTA (exim/postfix/qmail/whatever), web server (apache/thttpd/etc), and cron. eg

    # /etc/init.d/cron stop
    # /etc/init.d/apache stop
    # /etc/init.d/sendmail stop

4) Install your newly configured and built Mailman:

    # make install

5) Restart the services you previously stopped.

    # /etc/init.d/cron start
    # /etc/init.d/apache start
    # /etc/init.d/sendmail start

This gives a short outage, but shutting down those services ensures that nothing is fiddling with your installation at the time when it is being upgraded.

BAW: I'll note that if you're feeling reeaaallly gutsy and you're just upgrading within a minor rev series (e.g. MM2.0.8->2.0.9->2.0.10) you might be able to do a live install without shutting down your servers. Just install the new version on top of the old one. I definitely wouldn't recommend this for busy sites though.

Last changed on Tue Aug 26 00:59:46 2003 by rich cowan
Converted from the Mailman FAQ Wizard

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