[Mailman-Users] Re: Troubleshooting: no mail goes out to lists - commonthings to check
Jon Carnes
jonc at nc.rr.com
Tue Nov 12 19:26:51 CET 2002
Creating the link might help.
Is this a new install or an existing install that suddenly broke? If
it's a new install, did you do it via rpm or source? It's just very odd
that Mailman would attempt to run /usr/lib/sendmail and it not be
there...
Best of luck!
On Tue, 2002-11-12 at 11:42, jsingh wrote:
>
> I agree this was a great posting too. In specific I would like to ask
> you guys a question about how I can get rid of the messages in qfiles.
> I tried running
> Python -S qrunner
> And I got
> sh: /usr/lib/sendmail: not found
> sh: /usr/lib/sendmail: not found
> sh: /usr/lib/sendmail: not found
> sh: /usr/lib/sendmail: not found
> sh: /usr/lib/sendmail: not found
> sh: /usr/lib/sendmail: not found
> sh: /usr/lib/sendmail: not found
> Is it alright to create a symbolic link in the usr/lib/ directory for
> the sendmail binary ?
> Thanks
> jack
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: mailman-users-bounces+jsingh=fdu.edu at python.org
> [mailto:mailman-users-bounces+jsingh=fdu.edu at python.org] On Behalf Of
> peter schoch
> Sent: Saturday, November 09, 2002 5:31 PM
> To: mailman-users at python.org
> Subject: [Mailman-Users] Re: Troubleshooting: no mail goes out to lists
> - commonthings to check
>
> Jon, this was a great posting! I think it would probably be good to
> add to the FAQ page on the mailman site. I'd add that you might need to
> tweak sendmail's settings to allow some domains to forward to get this
> to work.
>
> All of your 'checks' were OK for me, and yet the lists were still not
> working. Then, on Friday, the lists just started sending.
>
> One of the subscribers had forgotten to remove their auto-reply "Out of
> Office" message. It replied multiple times to the subscription notices,
> and then the lists started and the auto-reply caused a huge number of
> posts! But now the lists have kept working.
>
> I have no errors, etc. in the logs. I have no idea of why it just
> started. I didn't change anything, modify anything... I'd feel better
> if I knew why, but...
>
> Tahnks for all of the help.
> Peter Schoch
> Here are some common things to check when no mail is going
> out from your
> lists.
>
> ======
> I'm going to assume Sendmail as the MTA (its still the
> most commonly
> found - though postfix is gaining ground):
>
> 0) Check_perms. In all cases you should start by checking
> the
> permissions on the files that were setup:
>
> ~mailman/bin/check_perms
>
> 1) Cron. Make sure that the cron daemon is running
>
> ps -aux |grep cron |grep -v grep
>
> This will print out the process information about the cron
>
> daemon. If it returns a blank line, then cron is NOT
> running.
>
> 2) Aliases. To create a mailman list you ran "newlist" and
> it
> printed out four lines that you needed to copy to the
> /etc/aliases file (or wherever your MTA goes to find its
> aliases). Check that the aliases are in /etc/aliases:
>
> grep wrapper /etc/aliases
>
> Even if the aliases are there, you may still need to reset
>
> the aliases hash table so that it includes this new alias
> information:
>
> newaliases
>
> Here is a typical alias listing for a group called "sys":
>
> ## system mailing list
> sys: "|/home/mailman/mail/wrapper post sys"
> sys-admin: "|/home/mailman/mail/wrapper mailowner sys"
> sys-request: "|/home/mailman/mail/wrapper mailcmd sys"
> sys-owner: sys-admin
>
> 3) Smrsh. Check to see if your MTA uses smrsh. Red Hat as
> well
> as a few other distributions automatically setup Sendmail
> to
> use smrsh. Smrsh stops Sendmail from running a script or
> other program that is included in an alias. Mailman uses a
>
> program called "wrapper" to run all of its aliases (see
> the
> alias examples above):
>
> grep "smrsh" sendmal.cf
>
> If this comes up blank then Sendmail does not use smrsh;
> if not, then your server is probably running smrsh and you
>
> need to make sure that smrsh is setup to allow Mailman's
> wrapper program to run. Locate the smrsh directory and do
> an ls -l of that directory. On Red Hat:
>
> ls -l /etc/smrsh
>
> and the output should be similar to:
>
> wrapper -> /home/mailman/mail/wrapper
>
> 4) Interface. Some distributions in a noble "attempt" to
> limit
> the number of open relays on the internet, default
> Sendmail
> so that it listens to a limited number of interfaces. The
> default interface that Mailman list's use is localhost
> (127.0.0.1) - this is configurable in Mailman's mm_cfg.py
> file. To check Sendmail's configuration file:
>
> grep "Port" sendmail.cf
>
> This will list out the DeamonPortOption and indicate the
> interfaces it listens on (0.0.0.0 would mean all
> interfaces).
>
> You can also check out which interfaces your MTA is
> listening
> on by using:
>
> netstat -na |grep ":25 "
>
> 5) Qrunner. If you are running Mailman 3.0x then qrunner
> is
> run every minute via a cron job (that is why cron *must*
> be
> running for Mailman to work). Try running the program by
> hand. The exact syntax can be found in Mailman's cron
> jobs:
>
> su mailman
> crontab -l
>
> Here is an example of running qrunner by hand:
>
> su mailman
> /usr/bin/python -S /home/mailman/cron/qrunner
>
> If this generates any errors then send those to the list
> for diagnosis - or look at the last few lines of errors
> and
> search the list for key words from the error messages.
>
> 6) Locks. A errant lock file can stop a list from
> processing as
> Mailman waits for the lock to be removed. Since your list
> is
> not sending, we shall assume that no lock files should be
> on
> the list and that it is safe to delete any we find.
>
> ls -l ~mailman/locks
>
> The output will be something like:
>
> qrunner.lock.moya.trilug.org.22845
>
> This indicates that process # 22845 created the lock. To
> look
> at this process and see what it is (if it still exists):
>
> ps aux |grep 22845 |grep -v grep
>
> 7) Logs. If you don't have any of the common problems
> above,
> then you should look for errors in your log files.
>
> First look for errors in your MTA log files. On Red Hat
> that
> would be in /var/log/maillog.
>
> Look in the log starting at the time you sent a test
> message.
> You should see your initial message come in and be passed
> onto to your Mailman list, afterwards you may see warnings
>
> or errors caused by Mailman trying to send out mail to the
>
> members of the list.
>
> Next look in Mailman's logs. The files are in
> ~mailman/logs/.
> There are several logs to look in for problems:
> error
> smtp-failure
> smtp
> vette
> config
> post
>
> Note: if you look in the qrunner log you will see several
> warnings about "Could not acquire qrunner lock", these are
>
> actually normal and are NOT a problem.
>
> Every line in the log files is dated so you should be able
> to
> isolate the place in the log files to start looking, based
> on
> when your problem started.
>
> 8) Qfiles. You may have a malformed email (or one that is
> simply
> too big) clogging up the flow of mail to your lists. Mail
> that is queued up by Mailman is stored in the directory:
> ~mailman/qfiles
>
> Move any files out of the directory and into a temporary
> directory, then send a new test message to your list. If
> that
> works, then you can move some of the old queued up files
> back
> and let those process. If it stops working again then you
> have a bad message in that batch - delete them or copy
> them to
> a different temporary directory.
>
> ======
>
> Please feel free to critic and expand on this. I'm hoping
> that it
> proves useful as a starting point for folks having
> mail-flow problems.
>
> -- Jon Carnes
>
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