Tech:Mail/2014-05-Redesign
On Saturday, May 17th, the mail services provided by Orain will by redesigned to create a better design for sysadmins to follows, reduce complexity of some set up and allow ease of work in the future.
The current design of the mail server on prod1 is a hacked system thrown together originally just for MediaWiki product mail.
- Plan
John will be the responsible party for the redesign, ensuring it suits the needs for sysadmins to use, the current functionality for the end-user remains as is or improves and the set up fully works.
Currently mail is stored in dedicated system folders under /home/$user/Maildir/. This set up is fine however as we began to expand mail, this created unnecessary 'dummy shells' under home which crowds quickly. The future plan is to have mail delivered to virtual mailboxes at /var/mail/vhosts/$domain/$user/. Mail will stay on prod1 under the mail.orain.org domain.
Note: For the duration of the redesign; postfix and dovecot will be disabled. The expected duration of this is 45 minutes from 16:30 UTC to 17:15 UTC.
- Changes
These are the likely changes to be occuring;
- Migrate to a MySQL database
- Upgrade Dovecot and Postfix
- Timeline
This is the expected timeline planned on May 16th. This may/will change.
| Time (UTC) | Service (Host) | Comment |
|---|---|---|
| 16:00-16:10 | MySQL (prod3) | New database and tables to be created |
| 16:10-16:30 | MySQL (prod3) | Migrate current email data over to new database |
| 16:30-16:35 | Postfix & Dovecot (prod1) | Processes will be stopped |
| 16:35-17:00 | Postfix & Dovecot (prod1) | Move over pre-created config files & updating versions |
| 17:00-17:30 | Postfix & Dovecot (prod1) | Restart services and dummy test |
| 17:30-18:00 | Postfix & Dovecot & MySQL (prod1/3) | Last minute debugging of services |
| 18:00 | Notice | End official maintenance window. All services will be back as normal. |