[Mailman-Users] Urgent Help! Need to repair my list

[Mark Sapiro]

Nathaniel Rahav wrote:

>I had 150 moderator requests on a particular list (all spam) and due to 
>some strange unicode characters in one or two of the messages, I was 
>receiving an error when trying to "delete all moderator requests marked 
>defer".
>So i went into the mailman directory on the server and did the following:
>cd mailman/data
>rm -f heldmsg-news*.pck
>
>where 'news' is the name of my list.


See
<http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/faqw-mm.py?req=show&file=faq04.074.htp>
for the proper way to do this the next time.


>Now when I go to the pending moderator requests page I get the following 
>error... can somebody please help me repair my list ? thanks :
>
>
>    Bug in Mailman version 2.1.5
>
>
>      We're sorry, we hit a bug!
>
>If you would like to help us identify the problem, please email a copy 
>of this page to the webmaster for this site with a description of what 
>happened. Thanks!
>
>
>        Traceback:
>
>Traceback (most recent call last):
>  File "/usr/local/mailman/scripts/driver", line 87, in run_main
>    main()
>  File "/usr/local/mailman/Mailman/Cgi/admindb.py", line 233, in main
>    num += show_helds_overview(mlist, form)
>  File "/usr/local/mailman/Mailman/Cgi/admindb.py", line 483, in show_helds_overview
>    mlist.HandleRequest(id, mm_cfg.DISCARD)
>  File "/usr/local/mailman/Mailman/ListAdmin.py", line 159, in HandleRequest
>    forward, addr)
>  File "/usr/local/mailman/Mailman/ListAdmin.py", line 345, in __handlepost
>    syslog('vette', note)
>  File "/usr/local/mailman/Mailman/Logging/Syslog.py", line 40, in write
>    self.write_ex(kind, msg, args, kws)
>  File "/usr/local/mailman/Mailman/Logging/Syslog.py", line 58, in write_ex
>    logf.write(msg + '\n')
>  File "/usr/local/mailman/Mailman/Logging/StampedLogger.py", line 73, in write
>    Logger.write(self, "%s %s" % (prefix, msg))
>  File "/usr/local/mailman/Mailman/Logging/Logger.py", line 91, in write
>    f.write(msg)
>UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\x92' in position 157: ordinal not in range(128)


What is happening is the held message requests are still in
lists/news/request.pck, but the data/heldmsg-news-*.pck files are
gone, so the admindb CGI is trying to remove the request and log the
discard. The logger throws the exception because of the non-ascii data
in the subject.

You can get past this by just removing lists/news/request.pck, but that
will also cause you to lose any new requests which may be OK. You can
look at the data/heldmsg-news-*.pck files with bin/dumpdb to see if
you might want any. You can also look at lists/news/request.pck with
bin/dumpdb to see if there might be anything of interest there before
removing it.

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