[Mailman-Users] Mailman on Mac OS X Server 10.3: Outgoing messagesstuck in qrunner/in folder

[Pierre Igot]

On 06-12-13, at 19:31, Mark Sapiro wrote:

> Pierre Igot wrote:
>>
>> I am running Mailman on an Xserve running Mac OS X Server 10.3.9. The
>> version of Mailman is the one included with Mac OS X Server 10.3.9.
>> (It's 2.1.2.)
>
>
> See
> <http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/faqw-mm.py?req=show&file=faq01.021.htp>

I am aware of this page and checked it before sending my request for  
help. The page didn't provide any information that addressed my  
issue, as far as I could tell.

>> I used the web-based Mailman interface to submit the list of 500
>> email addresses for new subscribers, through the "Mass Subscription"
>> web form. I just copied the list of email addresses (separated by
>> return chars) from a text editor and pasted it in the field and
>> submitted. My mistake (I think) was that I submitted the entire list
>> of 500 email addresses at once. Initially it SEEMED to work, i.e. I
>> got a confirmation page listing all the subscribers that had been
>> added to the list.
>
>
> Yes, it worked. The hangup was probably because of trying to send
> notifications.

Right--but I didn't see any error messages about anything. (I checked  
all the logs.) So it was a failure that was not exactly graceful :).

>> But then I became unable to access the admin page for the list
>> altogether. The server would simply not respond. I could still access
>> other parts of the web-based Mailman interface, but not the pages for
>> this particular list.
>>
>> After a bit of on-line research, I discovered that the problem was
>> probably due to "locks" in the
>>
>> /var/mailman/locks/
>>
>> folder. Indeed, when I looked inside that folder, I found a whole
>> series of files named:
>>
>> ...
>
>
> Yes, the problem was these locks.

OK, so based on what you are saying, deleting these locks doesn't  
cause any further problems, right?

>> The instructions for dealing with this were not exactly clear, so I
>> just removed all these files so that the "locks" folder was empty.
>> After that, I was able to access the list's admin pages again. So I
>> thought everything was good.
>>
>> Then I tried to send a message to my subscribers. (It's a receive-
>> only list, so I'll be the only one sending messages.) However, the
>> message that I sent never got sent to the mailing list's subscribers.
>>
>> After more online research, I found out that my message was actually
>> stuck inside the
>>
>> /var/mailman/qfiles/in/
>>
>> folder. I also found that I could force Mailman to send the message
>> by using the command:
>>
>> /usr/share/mailman/bin/qrunner -r All
>
>
> So the mailmanctl daemon and the qrunners aren't running unless you
> start the qrunners manually as above, but this isn't the way to do it.
>
> If you had done
>
> /usr/share/mailman/bin/mailmanctl start
>
> you wouldn't have had to kill the qrunners.

Well, there was nothing anywhere that indicated that I had to run  
this command :).

Like I said, before the mass subscriptions, everything ran fine and I  
never had to run this command. If "mailmanctl" somehow stopped, it  
certainly didn't notify me. And there was nothing in the user  
interface for Mailman that indicated that this was the problem.

Running this command did indeed fix the problem. The messages are now  
sent out automatically. Thanks!

>> This never happened with this list before I added the 500 subscribers
>> and had to fiddle with the /locks/ folder. Prior to that, when I was
>> still in the stage of testing the mailing list with only a handful of
>> test subscribers, everything worked fine and the messages would get
>> sent automatically.
>
>
> I think in Mac OSX server, Mailman is installed as a service and the
> service runs mailmanctl. Somehow you have stopped the service and you
> need to restart it.

Well, I did not stop the service intentionally. The Mailman service  
is part of the "Mail" service (which also controls POP and SMTP) and  
there is nothing in the server admin software that indicates that  
mailmanctl is not running. Probably a shortcoming of Apple's server  
admin software.

In any case, now I know that if things are not going out, I need to  
check if this "mailmanctl" is running. Thanks.

It's the kind of thing that is probably obvious to most readers of  
this list, but I had to subscribe to the list and ask the question to  
find out myself (or spend many hours reading the entire Mailman  
documentation, I suppose).

>> My suspicion is that the problem is due to what I did in the /locks/
>> folder, that maybe I wasn't supposed to remove all the files. (I have
>> kept them on a local disk in case I need to move them back to that
>> folder.)
>
>
> I doubt that removing the locks had anything to do with it, but you
> might check ALL of Mailman's log files to see what kinds of errors and
> other conditions occurred.

OK. I did check all the log files, and didn't see any significant  
errors.

Thanks again.

Pierre
--
Pierre Igot, administrateur des systèmes / Systems Administrator
www.cprp.ca
902-837-7391