A Case Study on Moves and Mergers
LISA '93 Proceedings of the 7th USENIX conference on System administration
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LISA '94 Proceedings of the 8th USENIX conference on System administration
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LISA '97 Proceedings of the 11th USENIX conference on System administration
What to Do When the Lease Expires: A Moving Experience
LISA '98 Proceedings of the 12th USENIX conference on System administration
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Mail administrators will inevitably face a situation where they will need to migrate their users from one server to another, not infrequently migrating to a different service altogether. In 2008, two divisions of Argonne National Laboratory found themselves needing to migrate their users from disparate divisional mail servers to a central, institutional Zimbra Collaboration Server. Each group approached the situation from a different direction, driven by different motivations, timelines, and external forces; each ultimately achieved its goal, one more smoothly than the other. The first migration was driven by a high sense of urgency resulting in a "fire hose" approach, an en masse move followed by a grand switchover; the second migration was a more measured "water fountain" approach, taking in lessons learned during the first migration. Examining the processes, decisions, and tools used in each conversion yields a roadmap of successes and pitfalls that should prove useful to any systems administrators facing a similar task, regardless of the timeline within which they must work.