[Mailman-Users] Mailing List - people say their e-mails "never appear"

[Patrick M.]

Brad Knowles wrote:
> On 9/5/07, Patrick M. wrote:
>
>>  I just installed Mailman on our load balanced Postfix servers.  Both
>>  servers share a common NFS point.
>
> Did you install it on all of them, or just one?  When you say they 
> share a common NFS point, are you trying to use NFS for the postfix 
> mail queue (which is a really, really bad idea), or just for the user 
> mailboxes (which is also usually a bad idea, although it can be made 
> somewhat less bad if you choose a mailbox format that is less 
> NFS-unfriendly)?
>
> Mailman itself is about as NFS-friendly as can be reasonably done, but 
> that still leaves a lot of room for problems.  Many of the other parts 
> of most mail systems are much, much less NFS-friendly than Mailman.
>
>>  Please forgive me, as I'm very new to Mailman.  While I know my way
>>  around Postfix, troubleshooting Mailman is another issue.
>
> When troubleshooting Mailman, you generally want to start with the 
> steps outlined in FAQ 4.78 at 
> <http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/faqw-mm.py?req=show&file=faq04.078.htp>. 
> You should also search the FAQ Wizard for other things that might be 
> related to your problems, and you should also search the archives.
>
>>  Since I don't know how to troubleshoot Mailman, I can only suspect that
>>  is has something to do with the NFS, although another part of me is
>>  telling me that it can't be.
>
> If NFS is involved anywhere in the picture, odds of Mr. Murphy raising 
> his nasty head have been increased by many, many orders of magnitude.
>
> That said, there are occasionally times when such a system has 
> problems that are actually unrelated to NFS.
>

Thanks for the detailed explanation.  One thing to mention is that this 
mail server is pushing close to 1 million e-mails a day, and has no 
issues with that whatsoever.  Both mail servers mount the /home for the 
usernames, and everything is stored in Maildir.  I'm almost positive 
there are no issues with NFS itself, as all other mail works just fine.  
Mailman is installed on both mail servers.  /usr/lib/mailman is NOT NFS 
mounted (meaning its installed on both machines), however I've NFS 
mounted the /var/lib/mailman directory, where all the lists and such are.

Now, with that being said, you mentioned that Mailman can be unfriendly 
when placed in an NFS environment.  How can I test to see that it is an 
NFS issue with Mailman?

I'll take a look at those docs and reply back to here.  Thanks again.

Patrick