backupmailman
=============


This program backs up all the files in your mailman setups that
will be necessary to recreate every list with the correct
subscriber list and subscriber settings.


*** THIS SCRIPT DOES NOT BACK UP THE LIST ARCHIVES ***
    (Mostly because they tend to be enormously huge
    so you don't want to go mailing them around the 
    internet every night!)


This file should be run every night, optimally, and at least
every week.  Remember, the most stable system can be hacked or
just crash because of a hardware fault at any moment!  How many
hours/days/weeks of subscriber info can you afford to loose?
That's the question that dictates how often you run this file.


INSTALLING
==========

After unzipping and untarring the distribution, which you have
probably done to get to this file, you only need to do three
easy steps:

1.  Edit backupmailman itself and make sure all the variables at
    the top of the file are appropriate for your installation.

    The current values should work for most Debian distributions
    (except, of course, the RECIPIENT variable who receives the
    email!).  For other distributions, edit as necessary, and
    double bonus points if you can tell me which edits ended up
    being required for your Unix/Linux version so I can put
    better documentation into the next version!


2.  Copy or move backupmailman to a place where cron will pick it
    up.  On many Linux installations, putting the file into 
       /etc/cron.daily
    will make sure that cron runs it automatically every night.
    Bingo - no more stuff to do!

    If this is not the case with your installation, you will need
    to make a cronjob run be either root (edit /etc/crontab then
    kill -HUP crond) or by the mailman user itself (execute
    'crontab -e' while you are logged in as that user).  If you
    don't know how crontab entries work, check 'man 8 crontab',
    its not hard to figure out.


3.  At the location pointed to by RECIPIENT in the backupmailman
    script, you may want to automatically process the incoming
    files with procmail.  If so, check out the 'procmailrc'
    fragment in the examples/ directory.


OTHER STUFF
===========

My name is Ricky Buchanan.  I can be contact at
<rb@tertius.net.au>.

All of my code is available on the web, look for the latest
release of things at:
   http://tertius.net.au/~rb/code/


LEGAL STUFF
===========

All files in this distribution are copyright (C) Ricky Buchanan,
2003. All rights reserved. 

This package is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the same terms as Perl itself.  The copyright, however,
remains mine.