[Mailman-Users] question about strange Mailman glitch

[Eric Evans]

Hello,

A while back I encountered a strange problem with Mailman, which we 
eventually got resolved, but I don't know why.  Although Mailman is working 
fine now I'm still wondering what the real nature of the problem was and 
I'm hoping that some of the Mailman experts on this list might be able to 
provide some insight.

We had already been running Mailman on our Sun for several months without 
any difficulties.  Then, we had an unexpected power outage in our 
building.  The Sun that was running the Mailman server lost power 
unexpectedly.  When it came back up, Mailman would no longer send out 
mail.  All attempts to send mail to mailing lists through Mailman resulted 
in the sendmail error message "name or service not known" showing up in the 
smtp error log file.  However I was able to send messages directly through 
sendmail, so I know that sendmail was working properly.  I talked to a 
Mailman expert who suggested looking at the my mm_cfg.py file.  The only 
statement that I had in there was a LOCALHOST statement, with the IP 
address of the local host, i.e. the Mailman server.  My correspondent the 
Mailman expert recommended deleting this statement from the mm_cfg.py, so I 
did, and then Mailman started working again!  But what's very puzzling is 
that Mailman was working for us for a long time with this LOCALHOST 
statement in there, and we didn't have any problems with it.  So why is it 
that this LOCALHOST statement was not causing a problem for us before the 
power outage but DID cause a problem after the power outage?  Anyone have 
any thoughts on this?

Thanks very much,
Eric