[Mailman-Users] Locking errors

[Ben Blakely]

Hi,

I'm having an intermittent locking problem with Mailman (version 2.0) on
a Slackware 7.1 (kernel 2.2.17) system. Apparently at random times, the
Web/cgi interface will become broken, and all page requests to
/mailman/admin will either give an "Internal Server Error" (apache logs
show nothing but a premature end of script headers) or simply not return
a response for quite awhile and eventually give a "Document Contains No
Data" error (browser flavor seems to be irrelavent, this has happened on
IE and Netscape and on both Windows and X-Windows). Taking a closer
look, I find that there will be a buildup of lockfiles in the
/home/mailman/locks directory, and some hung python processes. I turned
on the lock debugging, and the logs/locks file contains this sort of
entry:

Jan 03 10:08:06 2001 (14469) bentest.lock laying claim
Jan 03 10:08:06 2001 (14469) bentest.lock waiting for claim
Jan 03 10:08:33 2001 (14469) bentest.lock lifetime has expired, breaking
Jan 03 10:08:34 2001 (14469) bentest.lock lifetime has expired, breaking
Jan 03 10:08:34 2001 (14469) bentest.lock lifetime has expired, breaking
Jan 03 10:08:35 2001 (14469) bentest.lock lifetime has expired, breaking
Jan 03 10:08:37 2001 (14469) bentest.lock lifetime has expired, breaking
Jan 03 10:08:37 2001 (14469) bentest.lock lifetime has expired, breaking
Jan 03 10:08:39 2001 (14469) bentest.lock lifetime has expired, breaking
Jan 03 10:08:41 2001 (14469) bentest.lock lifetime has expired, breaking
Jan 03 10:08:41 2001 (14469) bentest.lock lifetime has expired, breaking
Jan 03 10:08:42 2001 (14469) bentest.lock lifetime has expired, breaking

And on and on. Now, the really weird thing is that this will start
happening to me on one browser, and I can hop over to another
workstation and, pull the admin interface with no problems, yet it will
continue to not work on the original station.  It seems that if I kill
off all the running python processes, delete everything in the locks
directory, and think good thoughts, it will sometimes start working
again, but some times it continues to not work.

Any thoughts on where my problem might be?


Ben Blakely
Systems Admin
I-Silver, Inc.
brb at isilver-inc.com