On 2/21/2010 2:15 AM, Stefan Foerster wrote:
Bad news. I was not able to reproduce the problem on a VM, using backups from the day the problem first occured. And worse, this night, while I slept a troubled, disturbed sleep, dreaming of SMTP dialogues, the list roster changed (one new member)- and the problem is gone.
Since I couldn't understand what possibly caused the problem in the first place, I'm not totally surprised.
I've been doing system administration tasks since 1997, and this still feels more like voodoo than science, sometimes.
Yes, it does, but I've found that there usually is an explanation. It's just that finding it may not be easy.
You could try taking the problem list's config.pck from the backup and dropping that into a lists/ directory with a different name (effectively creating a new list with the exact configuration of the old one).
Then you could install this withlist script in Mailman's bin/ directory as bin/test_smtp.py
from Mailman import mm_cfg mm_cfg.SMTPPORT = 10123 # or whatever you want from Mailman import Message from Mailman.Handlers import CalcRecips from Mailman.Handlers import SMTPDirect
def test_smtp(mlist): msg = Message.Message() msg['From'] = 'the usual poster to the list' msg.set_payload('message body') msgdata = {} CalcRecips.process(mlist, msg, msgdata) SMTPDirect.process(mlist, msg, msgdata)
And then run smtp-sink on the port defined in the script and run
bin/withlist -r test_smtp listname
where listname is the name of the new lists/ directory into which you put the old config.pck. This will short circuit a lot of Mailman stuff and strip it down to building the recipient list and sending the mail to the smtp-sink port.
Possibly you've already done something similar, but this would give you a low impact way to determine if you can duplicate the problem with the old config.pck.
Unfortunately, I don't have any good ideas as to how to proceed from there, even if this does duplicate the problem, but Barry indicated he has a couple of ideas.
-- Mark Sapiro <mark@msapiro.net> The highway is for gamblers, San Francisco Bay Area, California better use your sense - B. Dylan