[Mailman-Users] Newbie needs help - bug and upgrade issue

[Mark Sapiro]

Zebrina - Studio Intrepid wrote:
>
>There is one person using Mailman 2.1.4 and for a year it's worked perfectly.  All of a sudden they get the Bug error - http://lists.imaginestudios.org/mailman/admin on one of the two lists they use, the other one works fine.
>
>I have never used Mailman, nor do I know anything about it.  I would like help, teaching or I can offer a small amount to have some help fixing this issue.

The list configuration file for the problem list is corrupt.

There is a mailman installation somewhere on the server - the default
location is /usr/local/mailman/, but it could be anywhere. In this
directory is a lists/ directory and in that are at least 3
subdirectories, 'mailman/' and one each with names = to the two list
names. Each of these contains a few files including config.pck and
config.pck.last. It is these (or at least the config.pck) that are
corrupt for the problem list.

The first thing to try is for the problem list do

mv config.pck config.pck.back

This may fix the problem, but it may not. If the problem still exists,
the next best thing is to have a recent backup from just before the
problem started and restore the config.pck file from that.

If you don't have that, it is a serious problem because everything -
list config, member list, member options, etc. - is all in that file
and no where else, and you are going to have to start over with an
empty, default list. You may be able to extract information from the
corrupt file with something like

strings config.pck

or

strings config.pck.back

or

strings config.pck.last

but it will be tedious to put that information in a form usable for
configuring a list and adding members.

I hope you understand the above. If you don't, you will have to find
someone locally who does understand it to help you.

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