[Mailman-Users] duplicate messages

[Brad Barnett]

On Sat, 26 Apr 2003 18:13:50 +0100
Richard Barrett <r.barrett at openinfo.demon.co.uk> wrote:

> At 16:05 26/04/2003, Brad Barnett wrote:
> >On Sat, 26 Apr 2003 15:42:13 +0100
> >Richard Barrett <r.barrett at openinfo.demon.co.uk> wrote:
> >
> > > At 15:22 26/04/2003, Brad Barnett wrote:
> > >
> > >
> > > >Hey all,
> > > >
> > > >I've had a very bizarre situation occur with Mailman just last
> > > >week. After one post to the list, Mailman started generating
> > > >duplicate after duplicate of this same message.  It was caught in
> > > >the process of sending the fourth message out.
> > > >
> > > >The list.mbox file shows 4 identical messages, even if using diff
> > > >to check them against each other.  They all have the same message
> > > >ID, the same send time, etc.  Each of these messages was sent to
> > > >the over 10k users on this list, and I still don't know why.
> > >
> > > What version of Mailman are you using?
> >
> >
> >2.0.13, on Redhat 8.0.
> > >
> > > Are you sure Mailman did  not have four copies of this message
> > > delivered to it by your MTA?
> > >
> > > Have you checked your MTA's mail log to see if any trace of these
> > > events are showing there?
> >
> >I've scoured the sendmail logs, but I can't see any indication of it. 
> >Of course, these would have to be _identical_ messages, since Mailman
> >has four identical messages in its mbox.  Everything, even the receipt
> >time is identical.
> >
> >Is there any way to verify messages received / sent from the mailman
> >logs?
> >
> 
> You should find an entry(ies) in MM's $prefix/logs/post and smtp logs as
> it handles and sends out the message. The trouble is that both logs are 
> written as the qrunner takes the incoming message from the queue and 
> processes it rather than it being a log entry of when the message was 
> handed off from the MTA an put into the queue.
> 

I was told that the post log doesn't directly reflect the posts to the
list, but the messages it sends out?  

Apr 17 06:49:57 2003 (18609) post to ledetnews from sjledet at ledet.com,
size=25203, 128 failures
Apr 17 06:50:24 2003 (1724) post to ledetnews from sjledet at ledet.com,
size=25203, 100 failures
Apr 17 13:01:24 2003 (5671) post to ledetnews from
ledetnews-request at lists.ledet.com, size=661, 1 failures
Apr 17 13:03:30 2003 (5729) post to ledetnews from
ledetnews-request at lists.ledet.com, size=670, 1 failures

The weird thing is, the initial message was sent on the 15th.  Here it
claims the 17th, and there are no other messages around this time (this
list has one post or two a month).

It also show failures, but it doesn't indicate if they were successful at
all (there are 20k or so users on this list.. why doesn't it show how many
succeeded?  why does it show two posts, when 4 were sent (or one if
mailman duplicated the original message 4 times).  Two messages makes no
sense at all, but one or four would....

I don't get it.  Looking at the SMTP logs is useless, with 80k entries for
sends during the same time period.  All I can verify is that every user I
pick on the list, was sent beween 3 and 4 copies of the same message ID
with the same size (and users complained of such).  This makes sense since
mailman was stopped during the 4th send process.

> If I remember correctly, with MM 2.0.13 no msg ids are not recorded in 
> those logs but usually the date/time helps correlate with the sendmail 
> logs, You could also see if anything correlates with anything in the MM 
> error log.

Not really.. the times are off by days?!

> 
> I cannot recollect experiencing any problems of this sort with using MM 
> 2.0.13 but I've long sinsce upgraded to MM 2.1.1.
> 

I can't really justify an upgrade though, with the hope it fixes the
problem.  This problem has to be debugged and verified before mailman is
used again.  It may or may not be mailman's fault, but right now upgrading
isn't an option, since we don't know where the bug sits.


> > >
> > > >Mailman logging doesn't seem very helpful in determining this.  Is
> > > >there any way I can discover just what happened, and is this a
> > > >known bug in mailman?  I can provide any logging information
> > > >needed...
> > > >
> > > >Thanks!
> > >
> > >
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