[Mailman-Users] can root start qrunners? backups and disasterrecovery ???s

[Mark Sapiro]

Hugh Esco wrote:
>
>I want to write a perl or shell script to occasionally check that the qrunners are still running and if they are not, to restart them.  (I can't afford downtime like this).  My question is this.  Since each instance uses a distinct uid and gid, is it possible to have root handle this task in its crontab?  Or am I going to actually have to su - to each mailman user involved to restart the qrunners, or to install crontabs for each that will handle this job?  


The standard bin/mailmanctl (of which you will have one per instance)
when run as root will set the user and group of itself and its child
qrunners to the configured user and group for that instance (actually
MAILMAN_USER and MAILMAN_GROUP from that instance's
Defaults.py/mm_cfg.py).

So yes, you can run it as root.

Read the whole thread starting at
<http://mail.python.org/pipermail/mailman-users/2005-May/044888.html>
for more information, and see
<http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=1208685&group_id=103&atid=300103>
for the patch mentioned in that thread.


>One other issue, while we're on the subject of disaster recovery, which files and directories do I need to include in my daily back-ups?  And can anyone point me to a how-to that might describe how to restore from such backups should the unthinkable ever happen?  


You should be able to find lots on this in the archives of this list.
You absolutely need the lists/ and archives/ directories. The data/
directory contains held messages waiting moderator/administrator
approval and also the site passwords and queued, unprocessed bounces.

qfiles/ contains the current queues, although restoring those (except
maybe for 'shunt') is problematic as anything they contain will
probably have been processed by the time of the disaster/restore.
locks/ contains the current lockfiles and would almost certainly be
not valid by the time of any restore.

-- 
Mark Sapiro <msapiro at value.net>       The highway is for gamblers,
San Francisco Bay Area, California    better use your sense - B. Dylan