[Mailman-Users] some lists cannot receive emails after acrash(Incorrect padding)

[Mark Sapiro]

jay alvarez wrote:
>
>We just had a hardware failure with our mailserver
>running mailman+qmail, the smtpd as well as mailman
>daemons died because of hard disc space lost due to
>some logs overgrowned that were not rotated. The
>problem has already been fixed and the qmail daemons
>as well as mailman have been restarted, however, some
>mailing list cannot receive emails. Looking at smtpd
>logs, it seems like the client can successfully
>deliver emails to the mailserver but the mailman
>couldn't distribute it properly to list members.
>What's more suprising is that other lists can receive
>emails, but few can't.
>
>Below is the series of mailman error logs continuesly
>appearing from time to time during the normal
>operation, but I don't think it has something to do
>with the root of the problem. Hope you can help me..
>Thanks.
>
>
>
>   Oct 21 10:23:09 2005 (19519) SHUNTING:
>1118201593.7484629+ca85708cae103ebea5e28102d9aecb0ae1991f3f
>Oct 21 10:23:49 2005 (19519) Uncaught runner
>exception: Incorrect padding
>Oct 21 10:23:49 2005 (19519) Traceback (most recent
>call last):
>  File "/usr/local/mailman/Mailman/Queue/Runner.py",
>line 105, in _oneloop
>    self._onefile(msg, msgdata)
>  File "/usr/local/mailman/Mailman/Queue/Runner.py",
>line 155, in _onefile
>    keepqueued = self._dispose(mlist, msg, msgdata)
>  File
>"/usr/local/mailman/Mailman/Queue/IncomingRunner.py",
>line 130, in _dispose
>    more = self._dopipeline(mlist, msg, msgdata,
>pipeline)
>  File
>"/usr/local/mailman/Mailman/Queue/IncomingRunner.py",
>line 153, in _dopipeline
>    sys.modules[modname].process(mlist, msg, msgdata)
>  File
>"/usr/local/mailman/Mailman/Handlers/ToDigest.py",
>line 82, in process
>    send_digests(mlist, mboxfp)
>  File
>"/usr/local/mailman/Mailman/Handlers/ToDigest.py",
>line 123, in send_digests
>    send_i18n_digests(mlist, mboxfp)
>  File
>"/usr/local/mailman/Mailman/Handlers/ToDigest.py",
>line 303, in send_i18n_digests
>    print >> plainmsg, msg.get_payload(decode=1)
>  File
>"/usr/local/mailman/pythonlib/email/Message.py", line
>189, in get_payload
>    return Utils._bdecode(payload)
>  File "/usr/local/mailman/pythonlib/email/Utils.py",
>line 75, in _bdecode
>    value = base64.decodestring(s)
>  File "/usr/lib/python2.1/base64.py", line 44, in
>decodestring
>    return binascii.a2b_base64(s)
>Error: Incorrect padding
>
>Oct 21 10:23:49 2005 (19519) SHUNTING:
>1118204475.9834571+22369a18d9473e03619ce8224a5e274504872f9a

I think the offending list/lists has/have a corrupt digest.mbox file
that was being written when the system crashed. Either that or a bad
message has gotten into the file.

Look at lists/<list_name>/digest.mbox. The last message is probably
truncated. If you move it aside and then run bin/unshunt to reprocess
the messages in the shunt queue, things will probably get going
normally again, but the initial messages in the old digest.mbox will
be missing from the next digest. If this is important, you could try
to edit digest.mbox and remove the offending message instead of moving
the file aside.

If this is not the problem with the lists not processing, it may be
that they are locked. Look in Mailman's locks/ directory and manually
remove the old lock files.

-- 
Mark Sapiro <msapiro at value.net>       The highway is for gamblers,
San Francisco Bay Area, California    better use your sense - B. Dylan