[Mailman-Developers] b6, postfix/qrunner super disaster

[Christopher Kolar]

Hi all.  I know that one man's disaster is another man's chuckle at an 
incompetent amateur system administrator, but here goes.

I am running 2b6 under Mandrake 7.1 using postfix as an MTA.  Last Thursday 
I posted a note to a small mail list but the note never showed up.  I 
posted to the users list on that matter.  First off I addressed the locking 
problem and deleted the locks/ files.  That did not solve the problem, so I 
then looked at the smtp log and saw that Mm was trying to send the message, 
but was getting a return of:
         host not found
when trying to send the 20 copies of the message.  I messed around with it, 
and saw qrunner trying to resend the message every minute, and figured that 
it must be a temporary DNS problem with my ISP and left it alone.  During 
this process I monitored both the normal qrunner cron operations and also 
tried to manually push the queue by evoking the qrunner command line that 
is found in the cron file.

Then I left for four days in San Francisco.

When I got back I discovered that I had 20 new sworn enemies.  Sunday 
morning, as if by magic, the mail actually got delivered, 1400 copies of 
it.  Now I realize that I may have done something really stupid along the 
way, but I also think that it may be worthwhile to figure out what 
happened.  I am wondering if qrunner got the error message and kept the 
item in qfiles, but postfix also deferred delivery of the message and kept 
it in the MTA mqueue -- growing by one copy a minute until the server was 
able to successfully find the recipients' hosts.

If anyone would like to do some forensics on this I would be happy to share 
log file data, both from Mailman and the regular mail log.  Thanks in 
advance for thinking about this problem and what the cause of it may have been.

--chris

--
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  Christopher G. Kolar
    Director, Department of Instructional Technology
    Aurora University, Aurora, Illinois
  ckolar@admin.aurora.edu  --  www.aurora.edu/~ckolar
         [PGP Public Key ID: 0xC6492C72]