[Mailman-Users] List Using Old Membership List

[Mark Sapiro]

David Andrews wrote:

>I run Mailman 2.1.6 on a sun Cobalt RAQ 550 server.  There are about 
>100 lists with memberships ranging from 50 to 350.  On several 
>occasions, several of the lists seem to have reverted to using 
>membership lists from the past.  People who had unsubscribed as much 
>as two years ago, were suddenly subscribed again.


It's hard to imagine how this could happen. Is this a 'stock' Mailman
or do you have a custom member adaptor? If it is a custom member
adaptor, I suppose anything can happen depending on the member adaptor
and it's underlying storage scheme.

If this is a 'stock' mailman, all the membership information is kept in
the lists/<listname>/config.pck file with a one generation backup in
lists/<listname>/config.pck.last, and the config.pck.last is very up
to date representing the list's state just before it was last touched.

One possibliity is if the installation was upgraded from a 2.0.x
installation, there may be old, pre-upgrade config.db files
repersenting the pre-upgrade list settings and membership. If the
config.pck files somehow became unusable, Mailman could fall back to
the config.db which would be way out of date. However, because of the
way that config.pck/config.pck.last are updated/rotated, it's hard to
see how both could become unusable at the same time.

The message here though is that once a list has successfully
upgraded/converted from config.db to config.pck files, the config.db
files should be removed.


>Is this possible?  If so, how does it happen, and how can it be 
>prevented?


See above.


>finally, my UPS has gone bad, and is in the process of 
>being replaced, so the server has had some ungraceful shutdowns 
>recently.  Would this cause problems with Mailman?


Maybe. Losing power during disk i/o can cause all kinds of corruption.

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