On 2/5/07, Daniel Clark <dclark@pobox.com> wrote:

I need to change the gate_news watermark on one of my mailing lists, as it got incremented without a message actually being gatewayed from the usenet newsgroup to the mailing list (because of something to do with the "list" user's password having expired and cron).

I am using mailman 2.1.5-8sarge5.

I found that this information is contained in the list "config.pck" file:

# /var/lib/mailman/bin/dumpdb /var/lib/mailman/lists/<listname>/config.pck
| grep -i watermark 'usenet_watermark': 10,

What I want to do here is change usenet_watermark to 9; however I haven't been able to find any information on how to modify the config.pck file - anyone know how that would be done?

I did some more searching and found this technique:

1. Get the name of the variable out of the config.pck file:

/var/lib/mailman/bin/dumpdb /var/lib/mailman/lists/<listname>/config.pck \

| grep -i watermark 'usenet_watermark': 10,

2. Write the new value you want into a temporary file in the format config_list expects mlist. before the variable), and check to make sure that the file is correct:

cat > tmp

mlist.usenet_watermark = 9 # cat tmp mlist.usenet_watermark = 9

3. Run config_list with the tmp file as the input file against the list:

config_list -i tmp <listname>

4. Check to make sure the change was successful:

/var/lib/mailman/bin/dumpdb /var/lib/mailman/lists/<listname>/config.pck \

| grep -i watermark 'usenet_watermark': 9,

This worked, and got my message 10 gatewayed to the mailing list.