On 23 May 2002 at 15:23, Mitch Rerek wrote, in part:
> This is my first day on the list. I've joined because I have been tasked
> with moving ListServ lists and archives (notebooks) from an outside
> vendor who is using a VM system to an our Unix system.
...
> This is only my first week of delving into ListServ and while creating
> and managing lists (and list owners) seems straightforward, moving the
> older archives has me a bit puzzled.

LSoft has a file on their web site documenting VM conversions.

When I made our conversions a couple of years ago, I used ftp to pull
the list and archives directly from VM (LISTSERV recognizes the format
and makes any adjustments necessary).  My notes on this include:

To run FTP

   FTP nodename (VM domain)
   userid       (VM userid)
   password     (VM logon password)
   case         (means fileids translated to lower case)
   prompt       (toggle prompts in case of MGET)
   get/put/mget ...
   quit

Using this, I connected to a sufficiently authorized VM id and then
LCDed/CDed to the (in my case) directories containing the list
definition and then archives (the "mget"s were to pull back the
archives. Note also the "case" statement, as LISTSERV on unix wants all
lower case fileids.

This was fast and flawless (might do differently if I had thousands
instead of about 100 lists) except that very old lists with several
hundreds of archive files would cause the FTP to fail. Because each
file of an mget caused a separate connection and those connections took
some time to close, we sometimes reached the (VM stack's) maximum
concurrent connections. When this happened, I just broke the list
archives into a number of mgets.

If the lists are active at the time you are going this, there are other
concerns.  To address this, I "held" the list before moving, got the
list operational at the new site, and then altered the old VM list
definition to forward messages to the new list site (see the "New-List"
keyword; the old list would contain just the new-list=, validate=,
confidential= (if appropriate), and owner= statements).

Hope this helps, wayne


Wayne T. Smith                         Systems Group - UNET
[log in to unmask]                 University of Maine System