On 28 May 1999, Harald Meland wrote:
[Clark Evans]
As I was adding users to a list (probably around a thousand?), I got the error at the bottom.
I have experimented somewhat with adding lots of users to Mailman lists, and found that if the mass subscribe process takes to long, the CGI script is killed off by the server (and leaves me with a Netscape popup window saying "Document contained no data").
Apparently, for Apache, the appropriate config option is "Timeout" -- which defaults to 300 (= 5 minutes).
If the server kills off the CGI script at a bad time -- in the middle of saving the list config db -- you'll experience problems like you describe.
The solution is to replace the list's corrupted config.db with the previous version, called config.db.last.
Possible solutions I can think of:
Speeding up the mass subscribe processing:
Currently, when adding lots of members from the web interface, the list config db is saved after each addition, and then finally once more at the end.
It does this when using the command line add_members too.
How about a new option to add_members that skips the config file update? Should be safer than doing it via CGI.
And *why* would you want to add 1000+ members from the web interface? It's got to be a lot easier to give add_members a massaged list[proc|serv]/majorodom file than pasting in the addresses.
Dan
Dan Busarow 949 443 4172 Dana Point Communications, Inc. dan@dpcsys.com Dana Point, California 83 09 EF 59 E0 11 89 B4 8D 09 DB FD E1 DD 0C 82