Mailman 3 August 2004 - Mailman-Developers

Upgrade from 2.0 to 2.1.5 breaks on pending_subscriptions.db
by Fergus Donohue 07 Sep '04

07 Sep '04

Has anyone else come across this and if so what's the solution? I'm running an upgrade of our mailman install in a test environment and it's breaking with the following error. I'm running on Solaris 8 with Python 2.3.4. The 2.0 version of Mailman was using python 1.6. phoenix on old-hawk {731}# ls -la /home/misc/mailman/data/pending_subscriptio> -rw-rw-r-- 1 mailman mailman 97 Aug 16 14:27 /home/misc/mailman/data/pending_subscriptions.db phoenix on old-hawk {732}# tail -10 fd.ins.3 Updating Mailman 2.0 pending_subscriptions.db database Traceback (most recent call last): File "bin/update", line 780, in ? errors = main() File "bin/update", line 704, in main update_pending() File "bin/update", line 583, in update_pending addr = data[0].address AttributeError: 'str' object has no attribute 'address' make: *** [update] Error 1 If I dump pending_subscriptions on a box that can dump .db files I get: phoenix {353}# ./dumpdb /tmp/pending_subscriptions.db { 448473: ('emanuel.soreteanonescu2(a)mail.dcu.ie', 'cycbtsvf', 0, 1089674437), 'lastculltime': 1089723840} phoenix {354}# Does anyone have any ideas what's going on? Thanks, Fergus.

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Min requirements for running Mailman?
by Adam Boettiger 06 Sep '04

06 Sep '04

Apologies in advance for this basic of a question but this is technical in nature and thus doesn't seem appropriate for the users or list owners lists. Is there a listing somewhere for the minimum requirements or recommended config for running Mailman WRT machine, ram etc. My specific question is if it is possible to run it on a VPS such as http://www.linode.com/ ? If yes, this seems a more cost-effective alternative to paying for a dedicated box. Thoughts? AB

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Alternate user (and admin) interfaces
by Ian Bicking 05 Sep '04

05 Sep '04

I've been searching around for people's experiences implementing alternate web interfaces for Mailman, but I've been surprised not to find much. The desire to do this seems obvious to me -- there's a lot of different flavors of mailing list (discussion, announce, correspondance management, and many others). The interface tries to support all of these, and is rather overwhelming as a result. Since I haven't found other people making these interfaces, I'm guessing: (a) I'm not looking in the right places, (b) people are doing this but not sharing their results, (c) and it's so easy they don't even need to ask public questions about it, (d) or it's so hard they give up quickly, (e) or it's easy but fragile, and people create lots of prototypes but nothing serious, (e) or everyone lacks the imagination or interest to try. Now that I list them, (a) seems the most likely, but I swear I've really tried to find them. Are their examples people might suggest? Right now I'm just trying to evaluate the feasibility of creating a trimmed-down interface. Actually a couple interfaces: one for announce list subscribers (*very* minimal), another for announce list administrators (including some posting tools and reports), and another simplified discussion list user interface. Anyway, I just wanted to see if other people are thinking about this, have already done this, or can give any advise. It doesn't look hard from my first investigation, but I'm also not sure how to best implement -- Mailman's web interface confuses me a bit, and I'm guessing that it's an ad hoc application server. If we go ahead to make this, I suspect we'll want to do something more expedient (i.e., not based on Mailman 3.0), but it would be nice to do this in a way that can be shared, and something that isn't just a hack. -- Ian Bicking / ianb(a)colorstudy.com / http://blog.ianbicking.org

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Addition to FAQ re: List of available customization fields
by Adam Boettiger 01 Sep '04

01 Sep '04

I've read both FAQ's and used the FAQ Search Tool and it came up empty, so this is something else you may want to add to the FAQ: I see that you can insert customized fields into outgoing messages by using the <MM-Field-Name> tag. Where can I find a list of all field names available for insertion in this tag? AB

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Re: [Mailman-Developers] Min requirements for running Mailman?
by J C Lawrence 31 Aug '04

31 Aug '04

On Tue, 31 Aug 2004 12:19:29 -0400 Terri Oda <terri(a)zone12.com> wrote: > On Aug 31, 2004, at 5:00 AM, Nigel Metheringham wrote: >> Mailman is a bitch to package > I believe point number one there says it all. :) Many python applications are a bitch to package, especially if you also want to maintain a reasonable level of FHS conformance. > I've been running it from source on Red Hat, Debian and FreeBSD > machines for many years now without too many gotchas. I've been well pleased with the Debian packages over the last 5 years. -- J C Lawrence ---------(*) Satan, oscillate my metallic sonatas. claw(a)kanga.nu He lived as a devil, eh? http://www.kanga.nu/~claw/ Evil is a name of a foeman, as I live.

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2.0.14 -> 2.1.5 and pending requests
by mjinks＠uchicago.edu 31 Aug '04

31 Aug '04

Hi, all. Just checking to see that I have this right before I expend a lot of energy cleaning up what I think is a pretty big mess... Our story so far: we have a list server that was running for years on Mailman 1.0-rc2, and my mission is to get it up to date. A couple of weeks ago, acting on advice from someone on this list (might have been Barry, actually), we took the system up to the last release of the 2.0 series I could find, which was 2.0.14. Went okay, mostly. Now I'd like to make the jump to the latest. In testing, bin/update seems to gag on any list with anything in a request.pck file, like so: ... Updating mailing list: [whichever] Updating the held requests database. Traceback (most recent call last): File "/mnt/http-new/opt/pkgs/mailman-2.1.5/bin/update", line 780, in ? errors = main() File "/mnt/http-new/opt/pkgs/mailman-2.1.5/bin/update", line 670, in main errors = errors + dolist(listname) File "/mnt/http-new/opt/pkgs/mailman-2.1.5/bin/update", line 222, in dolist mlist._UpdateRecords() File "/mnt/http-new/opt/pkgs/mailman-2.1.5/Mailman/ListAdmin.py", line 533, in _UpdateRecords for id, (op, info) in self.__db.items(): ValueError: unpack tuple of wrong size ... At that point update dies, leaving the named list locked. So far, lists with nothing in their request databases seem to get a successful upgrade. Lists left locked by the last run are skipped, so we get a little further each time until I clean up the lock files. I went a-googling, and didn't find anything that looked like a reference to this exact problem, but did find this in response to a different upgrade issue, by Terri Oda in Mailman-Developers on July 30: If I recall correctly, Mailman still doesn't always deal gracefully with old pending stuff, so you may have to clear out those files before doing the upgrade Ugh: we have, at last count, 2,459 lists. Many are inactive and could probably be culled, but even so, there's no way I could go through all those request files by hand during an acceptable amount of downtime. Even if I could, they're not my lists; I can't make decisions for the list owners about administrative requests for their lists, and there's no way I'll be able to get all the list owners to clean out their requests without more flowing in. So if we really do have to have all the request files empty before an upgrade, there's no way we'll be able to upgrade. Have I confused myself? Is there a better way? We're running python 2.3.4 on Solaris 9/UltraSPARC. Thanks, -j -- Michael Jinks, ENSA, ENSS, VDN, NSIT, The University of Chicago, world "If the future's not bright, it's colorful." -- Einsturzende Neubauten

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Re: [Mailman3-dev] Re: [RETRANSMIT] Re: [Mailman-Developers] Debate about Mailman on BytesForAll
by J C Lawrence 27 Aug '04

27 Aug '04

On Thu, 26 Aug 2004 16:57:55 -0400 Kevin McCann <kmccann(a)bellanet.org> wrote: > "SQLite uses POSIX advisory locks to implement locking on Unix. On > windows it uses the LockFile(), LockFileEx(), and UnlockFile() system > calls. SQLite assumes that these system calls all work as > advertised. If that is not the case, then database corruption can > result. One should note that POSIX advisory locking is known to be > buggy or even unimplemented on many NFS implementations (including > recent versions of Mac OS X) and that there are reports of locking > problems for network filesystems under windows. Your best defense is > to not use SQLite for files on a network filesystem." I've spent some time mucking about in this area and it is a minefield. Very simply, throwing out all of the messy details, there is only one operation which is atomic under the network filesystems: creat (2). The exceptions where creat(2) is not guaranteed atomic are for some of the more obscure cacheing network filesystes which attempt to be resilient across intermittent/bad connectivity and node failures. If you want to account for those filesystems as well then sorry, there's just no guaranteed correct locking methodology. Yes, it is that bad. -- J C Lawrence ---------(*) Satan, oscillate my metallic sonatas. claw(a)kanga.nu He lived as a devil, eh? http://www.kanga.nu/~claw/ Evil is a name of a foeman, as I live.

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Debate about Mailman on BytesForAll
by Frederick Noronha (FN) 27 Aug '04

27 Aug '04

Hello from India: I am a Free Software enthusiast and co-founder of BytesForAll.org Recently, there was an interesting debate taking place on our discussion list, about Mailman 2.0 and future plans. Many are users of Mailman, and I would request those developers with the inclination to kindly check on the same at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/bytesforall_readers Regards, FN ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Frederick Noronha (FN) Near Convent, SALIGAO 403511 GOA India Freelance Journalist Tel: +91-832-2409490 MOBILE: 9822122436 fred at bytesforall.org fredericknoronha at vsnl.net http://fn.swiki.net (FN's swiki) http://www.ilug-goa.tk (GNULinux Users Group Goa)

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Re: [Mailman-Developers] Debate about Mailman on BytesForAll
by J C Lawrence 26 Aug '04

26 Aug '04

On Thu, 26 Aug 2004 16:10:05 -0400 (EDT) Dale Newfield <Dale(a)Newfield.org> wrote: > On Thu, 26 Aug 2004, Barry Warsaw wrote: > This means that you cannot guarantee correctness if these files are > located on an NFS mount. Actually you can't guarantee that anyway. Without NFS v4 file locks are unenforceable and still advisory. Ditto AFS and a large host of others. -- J C Lawrence ---------(*) Satan, oscillate my metallic sonatas. claw(a)kanga.nu He lived as a devil, eh? http://www.kanga.nu/~claw/ Evil is a name of a foeman, as I live.

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Permission problem on CGIs reading config.pck
by Chris Boulter 18 Aug '04

18 Aug '04

Hi, I'm getting an intermittent error with our (very non-standard) Mailman installation. Things are working fine in our (also non-standard) production installation, but not in development - so possibly I've broken something with my most recent enhancements, or possibly the installation is different. The error is: Permission denied: '/usr/local/mailman/lists/accounting/config.pck' The file mentioned: -rw-rw---- 1 root mailman 3678 Aug 16 09:00 /usr/local/mailman/lists/accounting/config.pck All config.pck files seem to have the same ownership on production as these, but the error is not occurring there. Here are the Apache processes on development, which also look the same as on production: cboulter@serpens:~$ ps -ef|grep apache root 4824 1 0 Aug 06 ? 0:00 /usr/local/apache/bin/httpd nobody 23519 4824 0 Aug 12 ? 0:00 /usr/local/apache/bin/httpd nobody 4827 4824 0 Aug 06 ? 0:01 /usr/local/apache/bin/httpd nobody 4825 4824 0 Aug 06 ? 0:01 /usr/local/apache/bin/httpd nobody 4826 4824 0 Aug 06 ? 0:01 /usr/local/apache/bin/httpd nobody 4828 4824 0 Aug 06 ? 0:01 /usr/local/apache/bin/httpd nobody 4829 4824 0 Aug 06 ? 0:01 /usr/local/apache/bin/httpd nobody 4831 4824 0 Aug 06 ? 0:01 /usr/local/apache/bin/httpd nobody 5066 4824 0 Aug 06 ? 0:01 /usr/local/apache/bin/httpd nobody 22039 4824 0 Aug 06 ? 0:01 /usr/local/apache/bin/httpd nobody 20334 4824 0 Aug 09 ? 0:01 /usr/local/apache/bin/httpd Is the problem caused by apache running as 'nobody', so that the Mailman CGI scripts don't have permission to read config.pck? Why doesn't this happen on production, where things seem to be the same? Finally, the full text of the error (line numbers won't match any standard distribution). I'd be very grateful for any help. Many thanks, Chris <head><title>Bug in Mailman version 2.1.2</title></head> <body bgcolor=#ffffff><h2>Bug in Mailman version 2.1.2</h2> <p><h3>We're sorry, we hit a bug!</h3> <p>If you would like to help us identify the problem, please email a copy of this page to the webmaster for this site with a description of what happened. Thanks! <h4>Traceback:</h4><p><pre> Traceback (most recent call last): File "/usr/local/mailman/scripts/driver", line 87, in run_main main() File "/usr/local/mailman/Mailman/Cgi/manage-subs.py", line 153, in main lists_of_memb = lists_of_member(domain, safeuser) File "/usr/local/mailman/Mailman/Cgi/manage-subs.py", line 598, in lists_of_member glist = MailList.MailList(listname, lock=0) File "/usr/local/mailman/Mailman/MailList.py", line 124, in __init__ self.Load() File "/usr/local/mailman/Mailman/MailList.py", line 583, in Load dict, e = self.__load(file) File "/usr/local/mailman/Mailman/MailList.py", line 549, in __load fp = open(dbfile) IOError: [Errno 13] Permission denied: '/usr/local/mailman/lists/accounting/config.pck' </pre></body> <p><hr><h4>Python information:</h4> <p><table> <tr><th>Variable</th><th>Value</th></tr> <tr><td><tt>sys.version</tt></td><td> 2.2.2 (#1, Feb 17 2003, 05:38:40) [GCC 3.2.2] </td></tr> <tr><td><tt>sys.executable</tt></td><td> /usr/local/bin/python </td></tr> <tr><td><tt>sys.prefix</tt></td><td> /usr/local </td></tr> <tr><td><tt>sys.exec_prefix</tt></td><td> /usr/local </td></tr> <tr><td><tt>sys.path</tt></td><td> /usr/local </td></tr> <tr><td><tt>sys.platform</tt></td><td> sunos5 </td></tr> </table> <p><hr><h4>Environment variables:</h4> <p><table> <tr><th>Variable</th><th>Value</th></tr> <tr><td><tt> HTTP_COOKIE </tt></td><td> NSES40Session=0%253A41208c56%253A12fc1ce838a494bb; LBS_Logout=logged_in; JSESSIONID=serpens.london.edu-1ec%253A41208c5d%253Ad3fa18da5385374; JSESSIONID=serpens.london.edu-2a%253A41208c67%253Ad243264513d677c5 </td></tr> <tr><td><tt> SERVER_SOFTWARE </tt></td><td> Apache/1.3.27 (Unix) </td></tr> <tr><td><tt> PYTHONPATH </tt></td><td> /usr/local/mailman </td></tr> <tr><td><tt> SCRIPT_FILENAME </tt></td><td> /usr/local/mailman/cgi-bin/manage-subs </td></tr> <tr><td><tt> SERVER_ADMIN </tt></td><td> [no address given] </td></tr> <tr><td><tt> SCRIPT_NAME </tt></td><td> /mailman/manage-subs </td></tr> <tr><td><tt> SERVER_SIGNATURE </tt></td><td> <ADDRESS>Apache/1.3.27 Server at serpens.london.edu Port 80</ADDRESS> </td></tr> <tr><td><tt> REQUEST_METHOD </tt></td><td> GET </td></tr> <tr><td><tt> HTTP_HOST </tt></td><td> serpens.london.edu </td></tr> <tr><td><tt> PATH_INFO </tt></td><td> /serpens.london.edu/xxx(a)london.edu </td></tr> <tr><td><tt> SERVER_PROTOCOL </tt></td><td> HTTP/1.0 </td></tr> <tr><td><tt> QUERY_STRING </tt></td><td> </td></tr> <tr><td><tt> TZ </tt></td><td> GB </td></tr> <tr><td><tt> REQUEST_URI </tt></td><td> /mailman/manage-subs/serpens.london.edu/xxx(a)london.edu </td></tr> <tr><td><tt> HTTP_ACCEPT </tt></td><td> image/gif, image/x-xbitmap, image/jpeg, image/pjpeg, application/vnd.ms-powerpoint, application/vnd.ms-excel, application/msword, application/x-shockwave-flash, */* </td></tr> <tr><td><tt> PATH_TRANSLATED </tt></td><td> /usr/local/apache/htdocs/serpens.london.edu/xxx(a)london.edu </td></tr> <tr><td><tt> HTTP_USER_AGENT </tt></td><td> Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1) </td></tr> <tr><td><tt> HTTP_CONNECTION </tt></td><td> Keep-Alive </td></tr> <tr><td><tt> SERVER_NAME </tt></td><td> serpens.london.edu </td></tr> <tr><td><tt> REMOTE_ADDR </tt></td><td> 163.119.71.11 </td></tr> <tr><td><tt> REMOTE_PORT </tt></td><td> 45213 </td></tr> <tr><td><tt> HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE </tt></td><td> en-gb </td></tr> <tr><td><tt> SERVER_ADDR </tt></td><td> 163.119.71.11 </td></tr> <tr><td><tt> SERVER_PORT </tt></td><td> 80 </td></tr> <tr><td><tt> GATEWAY_INTERFACE </tt></td><td> CGI/1.1 </td></tr> <tr><td><tt> HTTP_ACCEPT_ENCODING </tt></td><td> gzip, deflate </td></tr> <tr><td><tt> UNIQUE_ID </tt></td><td> QSCMaqN3RwsAABLcFtQ </td></tr> <tr><td><tt> DOCUMENT_ROOT </tt></td><td> /usr/local/apache/htdocs </td></tr> </table> -- chris(a)jellybaby.net

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Mailman-Developers August 2004