4.80. How do I upgrade from Mailman 2.1.x to a later Mailman 2.1.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 from https://launchpad.net/mailman/2.1/, http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/mailman/ or http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=103.

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 Mailman, and maybe your web server (apache/thttpd/etc). It is normally not necessary to stop your incoming MTA or cron daemon as the MTA and cron/gate_news will just continue to queue incoming messages in Mailman's qfiles/in/ queue. There is some very slight chance the the MTA could execute the mail wrapper just as it's being updated, and similarly cron/gate_news could run just as things are being updated, so to be ultra safe, you could stop these too. Depending on your OS and MTA you might do things like

    # service mailman stop
    # service httpd stop
    # service sendmail stop
    # service crond stop

4) Install your newly configured and built Mailman:

    # make install

5) Restart the services you previously stopped.

    # service mailman start
    # service httpd start
    # service sendmail start
    # service crond 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.

MAS: For my not too busy site, I just stop Mailman, install and start Mailman. YMMV

Important note! Mailman 2.1.9 has an error which leaves .bak files behind in qfiles/in/ when it encounters unparseable messages. If upgrading from 2.1.9, when you stop Mailman, it would be good to remove any .bak files from qfiles/in before starting Mailman again to avoid a flood of unparseable message errors in the error log. See http://mail.python.org/pipermail/mailman-announce/2008-April/000110.html.

Converted from the Mailman FAQ Wizard

This is one of many Frequently Asked Questions.

MailmanWiki: DOC/4.80 How do I upgrade from Mailman 2.1.x to a later Mailman 2.1.y? (last edited 2015-08-24 00:42:39 by msapiro)