Lists.berkeley.edu: Notes on Sympa

Updated June 7, 2004

Lists.berkeley.edu: Notes on Sympa

Notes and references on Sympa, a mailing list management package being investigated at the University of California, Berkeley.

Documentation, software, and community
Contacts at other sites
End user documentation examples
Topical notes
How to provide high availability

Documentation, software, and community

Sympa is an open source package written in Perl, with an ANSI C component. It also requires a number of CPAN libraries and an RDMBS (MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle ...).

Home page

Documentation

Reference Manual

FAQ

Software

Binaries

Sources

Release notes

Mailing lists

sympa-users (archives)

sympa-users (subscribe)

sympa-users (search archives)

Advanced search

Contacts at other sites
Brandeis	Dave Wedaman Contact info	Rich Graves Contact info
CalTech Computer Science Department	Pat Cahalan Contact info	David LeBlanc Contact info
Texas A&M	Keith A. Marrocco Contact info
Tufts	Tracy Gangwer Contact info	Kendall Libby Contact info

End user documentation examples
ONE/Northwest	Ten cool things you can do with our new email list software [article] Email List Hosting FAQ
OSDN	Mail commands [Front-end to Sympa-based website, listing email commands]
Tufts University	Tufts Elist service Tufts Elist Manual [PDF, ~500 KB] Tufts Elist Tips Sheet [PDF, ~30 KB]

Topical notes

How to provide high availability

From Serge Aumont of Comite Reseaux des Universites (CRU) on 2004-03-31:


						In order to restart mailing list services after hardware failure

						you need :

						- to restore sympa expl and etc directory

						- to restart SQL backend service (most SQL server includes

							high availability features)

						- if you want the service to restart without any lost of

					  	messages you need some mirroring of spools

						- make web, ldap, sendmail and so on availible

						

						Sympa do not provide specific feature for this, but it should not

						be to hard to script some mirroring of requested files.

From Rich Graves of Brandeis University on 2004-04-01:


						[We use] Linux software RAID 1, which we've found more

						reliable than hardware RAID.



						Normal nightly backups.



						We run mysqldump once (or more?) per day to a separate

						disk. This ensures a recoverable copy of the database in

						case of corruption.



						You only need 3 things to restore Sympa -- the flat files

						in the expl directory that define the lists, the mysql

						database that holds the list membership, and the

						/etc/aliases file. In case of disaster recovery, it would

						be ok for these to be slightly out of sync -- it's not

						absolutely to ensure simultaneous atomic backups of all 3.



						One could configure a standby server and rsync aliases,

						expl, and mysqldump from time to time, or even do live

						mysql replication. But we haven't bothered. Email is a

						store-and-forward sort of thing.



						We are prepared to lose historical list archives (at least

						until they can be restored from tape) in case of outage.

						It is nice that they are stored separately. Lyris stores

						list archives in the same adatabases used for list

						definition and membership. Frequent corruption of large

						list archives caused us a lot of Lyris downtime. No such

						problems with Sympa.