Updating an adopted installation from 4.54

[Kevin Miller]

Jay R. Ashworth wrote:
> I'm the new Network Guy at a company that's running MailScanner 4.54.6
> as a smarthost in between an Exchange 5.5/Win2K server and the
> Internet. 
> 
> Partially because of the version number, and partially because one of
> the VPs commented on his upticked spam last week (:-), clearly it's
> time for me to upgrade.
> 
> Is this just a "drop on top" upgrade, as the doco seems to suggest? 
> Is 
> there likely to be customization or training I need to take special
> note of?  I'm an old time mail guy, but new to MailScanner; pointers
> welcome.
> 
> Incidentally, love the Best Practices page; I've linked to it from my
> (semi-nascent) bestpractices.wikia.com.

Hi Jay,

Welcome to MailScanner - almost as much fun as Rivendell!

Upgrading is pretty easy, assuming the previous admin didn't do anything
goofy.  The nickle overview is essentially:
1)	Stop running MailScanner daemons
2)	Install the newest version of MailScanner.  I use the ones for
SUSE - not sure what distro you're running on.  Pretty much just a
matter of going to the directory where I unpacked the tarball and
running install.sh (I think that's the name of the script - it's very
obvious at any rate).
3)	Follow the directions at the end of the process - a ton of stuff
will scroll by during the install.  The last thing it tells you is to
run the Upgrade_MailScanner script.  If you run it w/o args, it will
print out several command lines.  Just copy/paste each to the CLI a step
at a time and you'll be golden.  The upgrade script looks at the old
MailScanner.conf compares it to the new one with shiney new options, and
merges the two so that all your non-default settings and site specific
entries are automatically merged.  Julian makes life very easy for his
users.
4)	Restart MailScanner and 'tail -f' the mail log to make sure
things are flowing as expected.

Note that MailScanner isn't really catching spam - it's more a traffic
cop to facilitate the coordidnated use of multiple other tools, such as
spamassassin, antivirus scanners, RBLs, etc.  As such, I'd look at your
version of spamassassin and upgrade it too.  It's probably out of date,
given that your MailScanner is.  I'll bet you're also running ClamAV.
Julian makes a nice one stop shopping install of spamassassin and clamav
that makes upgrading painless.  It'll set up the MailScanner specifics
in the approprite spamassassin conf files for you.

FWIW, I run multiple MailScanner gateways on different subnets.  That
way mail keeps flowing even when one is being upgraded or otherwise off
line.  If you've got a spare box around it may be a good use for it...

...Kevin
-- 
Kevin Miller                Registered Linux User No: 307357
CBJ MIS Dept.               Network Systems Admin., Mail Admin.
155 South Seward Street     ph: (907) 586-0242
Juneau, Alaska 99801        fax: (907 586-4500