I am currently running my Axigen installation on a Windows Server that is going to be decommissioned in several months. I plan to replace the server with a Debian 10 instance and would therefore like to migrate Axigen from Windows to Linux.
Based on a thread elsewhere that suggests it is possible to migrate a Linux installation to a new installation of Linux by simply copying the contents of some main directories, I am optimistic a Windows-to-Linux migration is possible, albeit with some additional work.
All of my work can be done with the Axigen servers offline, so there is no challenge of migrating a running server.
My plan is:
Install Axigen on the Linux server.
Stop Axigen on both servers.
Copy several key directories from Windows to Linux. It looks like I need to copy the “domains”, “filters”, “run”, and “serverData” directories.
It looks like the axigen.cfg file has several Windows paths inside of it, so I will need to search and replace those to change them to Linux paths.
Restart Axigen on the Linux server and see how it works.
Am I missing anything? Is this a migration anyone has experience with?
Yes, looks good.
But it also depends what Axigen versions are you migrating from.
It would be advisable to match the Axigen version on both Windows and Linux, do the migration as you sketched, then potentially upgrade on the new Linux box.
I’ve finally started this effort. I’ve followed the steps above, including using the same version and modifying the axigen.cnf file to use the proper Linux paths rather than Windows paths.
However, when I try to start Axigen after the configuration changes, the init.d script simply reports that it failed to start.
Is there any way to verify a configuration file or get more debug information at start-up time so that I can determine what is wrong?
Alternatively, is there a better way to migrate from Windows to Linux?
Any configuration errors as well as starting service messages are reported into the mail syslog facility (depending of the Linux type you are using it may be /var/log/maillog or /var/log/mail.log or similar).
My latest plan is to use the “automatic migration” feature in Axigen. I will need to have all of my users make sure they have seen all of their email migrated to the Linux (new) server before shutting down the Windows (old) server.
This should work since I have done some spot testing with my own account and it looks good. The only odd behavior is that the migration thread seems to stop after about 15 minutes and needs to be “kick-started” again by closing and re-opening a mail client. The network connection between the two servers is fairly limited in bandwidth, so it takes about 2 hours to migrate a many-gigabyte user mailbox in full. So lots of stopping and restarting. But it eventually migrates everything.
One note: The automatic migration feature is mostly under a new top heading in the administrative UI. The documentation might need to be updated to point that out. There is still a single checkbox (“enable automatic migration for this domain”) within the domain administration section, but that doesn’t seem to do anything.
I have successfully migrated my Axigen instance from Windows to Linux using the automatic migration feature. Although it may have ultimately been possible to do a direct file copy, that approach was not working for me through several hours of struggle, so rather than prolong that, I changed course toward the automatic migration.
I now have an unrelated and new issue with Axigen 10.3 on Debian 10: My Axigen server is periodically becoming unreachable via IMAP and must be restarted. It appears to possibly be related to the SSL/TLS termination, because it first manifests as some IMAP users showing up with various SSL alerts in my imap.txt Axigen log file. I’ll create a new thread about that.