[BlueOnyx:04857] Re: question on importing sendmail content fromnon-blueonyx server

[Michael Stauber]

Hi Rodrigo,

> I have a standalone mail server running sendmail and I want to move all
> users and related contents over to a blueonyx server.  What is the
> recommended method of importing sendmail from a non-blueonyx server to a
> blueonyx server?

As you don't know the passwords for the accounts in question this is a bit 
tricky, but can be done.

If it's just a few sites and users, then I'd create the sites and users 
manually through the GUI. Just assign a generic (temporary) password to all 
users while you do so.

Then copy the site and user data to the newly created directories on BlueOnyx 
and make sure they're chown'ed to the right UID and GID.

If the source box uses /etc/shadow for storing system passwords, simply copy 
the 2nd colum behind each username to the /etc/shadow on BlueOnyx to replace 
your (encrypted) generic passwords with the original (encrypted) passwords 
from the old box.

If the original box uses PWDB for storing user information, then it may be 
worth it to convert it so that you can extract the encrypted passwords.

The amount of work involved kind of depends on how many sites and users you 
need to import. If it's more than a couple of dozend, then it may be worth the 
efforts to script it to some degree or another and to maybe write a wrapper 
around the shell tools to at least automatically create sites and users for 
you based on a textfile that contains the sites and/or users.

The location of the mailboxes of the original users may also be different, so 
be careful there. Some systems store mail in /var/spool/<username>, while 
BlueOnyx stores them in a file called "mailbox" in the home directory of the 
user, like ... ~<username>/mbox

Also: Some systems use the Maildir format for storing mails, while BlueOnyx 
used the "mbox" format. While there are scripts available to convert maildrops 
from Maildir to Mbox format (and back) this of course requires another manual 
(or scripted) intervention.

So yes ... it can be done, but it could be quite a bit of work.

-- 
With best regards

Michael Stauber