[Mailman-Users] Problem in gateway_to_mail processing

[Martin Wolske]

We have run into a problem with the gateway_to_mail function in our 
Mailman 2.1.4 install on our Redhat Linux server that seems to have 
begun recently.  Unfortunately, we can't pinpoint the exact time or 
cause of the problem.  Each of our lists performing nntp gating was 
properly gating news to and from our local news server when this was 
setup earlier this year.  However, recently we began getting reports 
that some postings to the newsgroups were not being gated to the 
corresponding mailing lists. 

After quite a bit of diagnostics, it appears that only 9 of the 63 lists 
are being processed by cron/gate_news.  Further, I made a modification 
to have gate_news write to syslog all lists that are being checked to 
see if gateway_to_mail is true; it looks as if only a fraction of all 
our lists are being checked.  In one case I created a new list, 
testing2, and used config_lists to make sure it's configuration was 
identical, except in name, to testing.  However, only testing was listed 
by my modified gate_news as being checked to see if gateway_to_mail was 
true; testing2 was completely ignored as a list by cron/gate_news.  This 
in spite of confirming using dumpdb that both lists .pck files are 
identical.

I've followed through the code to see where, in Site.py, it checks for 
lists in the mm_cfg.py default directory.  The lists are all in the same 
directory tree.  They all show up in the list_lists listing.  Why would 
it be that Utils.list_names might be listing only a subset of our 
lists?  Any pointers on what to try to diagnose this problem would be 
greatly appreciated.  These are production lists for our school and 
we're anxious to get this problem fixed.