Moving Groups

[Russ Allbery]

Andy Malato <andym at njit.edu> writes:

> I have upgraded INN to the latest 2.3.4 and I would like to move over
> all my old articles from my old server running 1.7.2.  I have kept the
> storage method the same, i.e., using tradspool.  Can I simply use tar to
> copy the articles to the new system, or do I need to move the articles
> over using a different method?

You can do that and then run makehistory, but you may have better luck
using innxmit to send all the articles to the new server over protocol.

URL: <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/faqs/inn.html#S6.4>

Subject: 6.4. Feed all articles on a server to another server

To feed all articles on an existing server to another one, regardless of
how they're stored on the server, first tell the new server to accept
articles regardless of how old they are (otherwise, INN will reject
articles older than artcutoff in inn.conf):

    ctlinnd param c 0

You may also want to set xrefslave to true in inn.conf and then restart
INN on the new server if you want to keep the same article numbers as you
had on the old server.

Then try these commands (a variation on commands posted by Katsuhiro
Kondou to inn-workers) on the old server:

    cd pathdb
    perl -ne 'chomp; ($a,$b,$_) = split " "; print "$_\n" if $_' history \
        | tr . / > pathoutgoing/list
    innxmit server list

where pathdb is the path to the directory containing the history file
(usually ~news/db), pathoutgoing is the path to the outgoing spool
directory (usually ~news/spool/outgoing), and server is the name of the
new news server to which you're feeding the articles.

When done, set xrefslave to false in inn.conf again if you changed it and
then either restart INN on the new server (necessary if you changed
xrefslave) or use another ctlinnd param command to set the cutoff value
back to what's specified in inn.conf.

Please note that this method requires that all of the articles in your
spool have Xref headers.  Current versions of INN will always add an Xref
header, but very old versions (earlier 1.x versions) will only add an Xref
header to crossposted articles.  If you're trying to import such a spool,
you'll need to modify all of those articles to add an Xref header.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra at stanford.edu)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>

    Please send questions to the list rather than mailing me directly.
     <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/faqs/questions.html> explains why.