[Mailman-Users] question about strange Mailman glitch

[Mark Sapiro]

Out of curiousity, I looked and found the original thread. The last 3
messages in the thread are the most relevant. The first of these 3 is
at
<http://mail.python.org/pipermail/mailman-users/2005-November/047813.html>

Actually, the part of that old thread that is most relevant here is the
following quote from the last post in the thread:

<quote>
You said you had

SMTPHOST = '<128.253.175.139>'


and I remarked

>>Which is probably using sendmail and not trying to connect to an SMTP
>>server at <128.253.175.139> (which BTW is if anything, a name and not
>>an IP address).


I.e '<128.253.175.139>' is not the same as '128.253.175.139'. The
latter is an IP address and the former is a name. Maybe something in
your DNS or other configuration changed so the name
'<128.253.175.139>' could no longer be resolved.
</quote>


So I think either

SMTPHOST = '<128.253.175.139>'

was added to mm_cfg.py and Mailman was never restarted until after the
power outage (this would not be unusual - the Mailman that runs my
production lists has been running for about a year without restart - a
sad comment from a Mailman developer, but that particular server is
out of my control).

Or possibly some change was made elsewhere that caused the name
'<128.253.175.139>' to stop working, but that change wasn't effective
until the system restarted after the power outage.

The moral here is always do 'bin/mailmanctl restart' after any
mm_cfg.py change or you might be in for an unexpected surprise down
the road.

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