Re: cyrus 2.5 upgradepath

Hi!

ellie timoney wrote on 12/05/2025 02:56:
> On Fri, 9 May 2025, at 9:03 PM, Wolfgang Breyha wrote:
>  > Would it be possible to place 3.8 backends into the existing setup and XFER
>  > the mailboxes without the issues raised by an in place upgrade? Or should I
>  > use 3.4 as well?
> 
> This /might/ work.
> 
> As I recall, the big issue with in-place upgrades across the 3.4->3.6 boundary 
> is the rewrite of mailboxes.db that happens on first startup.  Older versions 
> didn't guarantee the information required by the rewrite was present, and if 
> any mailbox is missing it, the rewrite will fail and the upgraded server might 
> be unable to start, or start in a weird state.  Upgrading to 3.4.4+ first, 
> running it for a while, and fixing anything that it reports as broken, gets 
> you into a good position for a later upgrade to 3.6 or 3.8 to succeed.

Well, I can try running 3.8+
ctl_cyrusdb -r
on a set of cyrus DBs from my 2.5 production hosts to detect such issues upfront.

> The devil is really in the data here, rather than the configuration. 
>   Anecdotally, it seems like the biggest difficulties come from mailboxes that 
> have been around for a long time, especially if this 2.5 environment was 
> previously upgraded from 2.4 or earlier, and mailboxes that were around back 
> then are still active.  Small scale testing tends to happen with new, small 
> mailboxes, on newly-installed servers, and this doesn't reflect reality 
> particularly well.

Our infrastructure is growing from 1.6+;-) BUT each and every mailbox was 
XFER'd from 2.4 to new 2.5 backends in our murder. It should be safe to say 
that every mailbox and DB has at least a 2.5 structure on skiplist or twoskip.

Almost all of them only using classic features 
(mail,sieve,subscriptions,quota,annotations(expire,squat)). Some basic sharing.

Only a handfull calenders appeared in 2.5.

> If it were me, and if I had the resources to do so, I would want to get 
> snapshots from some of my real servers -- at least one frontend, at least one 
> backend, and mupdate -- and then spin up virtualised clones to test the 
> various upgrade paths with real data.  See what problems shake out, and work 
> out how to address them.  Rinse and repeat with fresh snapshots until I'm 
> confident, and only then start touching the live servers/mailboxes.

Yeah. That's close to impossible even with already virtualized hosts.

I'll try my luck running ctl_cyrusdb on the databases first. If that fails 
bigtime I'll go for 3.4. If that shows only resolveable issues I'm tempted to 
go for 3.8.

> Cheers,

Thanks a lot for your valueable input!

Greetings,
Wolfgang
-- 
Wolfgang Breyha <[email protected]> | https://www.blafasel.at/
Vienna University Computer Center | Austria



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