[Mailman-Users] Anyone ever had a list disapear?

[John Viega]

I encountered a very strange very similar problem just 2 days ago.
The list "disappeared" in that no operations could be performed on the
list, and that if you went to the web page it would say "no such list"
or something.  When the list gets loaded, a file called config.db is
backed up to config.db.last.  If something happens such that config.db
can't be loaded, it is supposed to try to load the backup.  Apparently
it didn't, because I went and looked, and there was a config.db.last
file, but no config.db file, and when I copied the .last to .db,
everything started working again immediately.

As to what the problem was, I couldn't say for sure, but it seemed
that the machine had run out of some sort of resource (I think perhaps
disk space) while it was writing back out the config.db file, and was
unable to finish.  It may be due to just really heavy load on the
machine, and not disk space.  In short, I didn't really have enough
info to track it down, but those sorts of things were going on at the
time, and they seem to make sense.

John

On Tue, Mar 09, 1999 at 06:12:56PM -0500, Chris Barnett wrote:
> Hi.  I've been using Mailman b8 for a couple of weeks and have run
> several small lists with no problems whatsoever.  Today, I set up a big
> list (2800 people) and sent out my mail.  It was going fine, except for
> the large number of bouncing addresses, but that was to be expected.
> 
> I was watching my steady stream of bounce-disabled messages (very nice
> feature, btw) and the occasional reply from members when I started
> getting a different stream of error messages.  This error was that mail
> couldn't be delivered to the alias for the list-admin.
> 
> My /etc/aliases was fine and I started to look at the error log for
> mailman.  It's loaded with MMBadListError messages.  Next, I tried to
> look at my settings on the web and I was promptly informed that my list
> didn't exist on the server.  And sure enough, the list was indeed gone.
> 
> I'm the only admin for the list and the box itself so no one removed it
> without my knowledge.  It just vanished.
> 
> Anyone else had a list disappear?  
> 
> It's no big deal to recreate this list, but it is a little unsettling
> that a list would just disappear.
> 
> My system is running mailman 1.0b8, python 1.5.1, redhat 5.2, and
> whatever standard version of sendmail that comes in the redhat 5.2
> distribution.  It's a PII 450 with 128MB of ram and was handling the
> load fine (except for the list disappearing).  My error log is available
> if you wanna try and diagnose what happened.
> 
> Thanks for any insights,
> 
> Chris Barnett
> Web Designer
> Unviersity of Florida Foundation, Inc.
> 
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