[Mailman-Users] Mailman issues during migration (test to production)

[Darren G Pifer]

Hello,

I am having an issue where I am migrating lists/archives/data from one
machine to another machine.  The machine I am migrating from is a Red
Hat Enterprise Linux 3 machine running mailman 2.1.6b4.  Mailman was
built from source code.  The machine I am migrating to is a Red Hat
Linux 5 machine running mailman 2.1.9.  I am using the mailman version
from the RHEL 5 DVDs.  I set up a test list server on the machine (where
eventually would become the production list server) and added a DNS A
record for test.list.odu.edu for the machine it is running on.  I used
the following document (even though it was for Debian it appears to work
for other flavors of Linux) for my information for migrating the
lists/archives/data: 

http://www.debian-administration.org/articles/567

I was successful in testing mailman on the machine. One change I needed
to make was the URL (because the lists contained list.odu.edu), so I
ran:

./withlist -l -r fix_url LIST_NAME -u test.list.odu.edu

to update the URL for each list. 

On Sunday, I attempted to change the test list server to a production
list server, so prior to migrating the lists/archives/data, I removed
all files those directories.  Also, prior to starting mailman and
sendmail, I made changes to mm_cfg.py (when I set up the test listserve)
from:

DEFAULT_HOST_NAME = 'test.list.odu.edu'
DEFAULT_EMAIL_HOST = '.test.list.odu.edu'
DEFAULT_URL_HOST = 'test.list.odu.edu'
DEFAULT_URL       = 'http://test.list.odu.edu/'

to:

DEFAULT_HOST_NAME = 'list.odu.edu'
DEFAULT_EMAIL_HOST = 'list.odu.edu'
DEFAULT_URL_HOST = 'list.odu.edu'
DEFAULT_URL       = 'http://list.odu.edu/'

I also made sure the sendmail.cf file on the new machine had:

C{mailman} list.odu.edu

When I started sendmail and mailman, I started to see a lot of messages
in /var/spool/mqueue. The sendmail (qf) queue files had these lines:

...
H??MIME-Version: 1.0
H??Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
H??Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
H??Subject: test.list.odu.edu mailing list memberships reminder
H??From: mailman-owner at test.list.odu.edu
H??To: spawn1882 at yahoo.com
H??X-No-Archive: yes
H??Message-ID: <mailman.4590.1201860028.4212.mailman at test.list.odu.edu>
H??Date: Fri, 01 Feb 2008 05:00:28 -0500
H??Precedence: bulk
H??X-BeenThere: mailman at test.list.odu.edu
H??X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.9
H??List-Id: Mailman site list <mailman.test.list.odu.edu>
...

So, it appears that mailman was trying to send out password reminders
even though it should not have run.  The system is configured to execute
the monthly password reminders only on the first on the month.  Since
the day of the install was Sunday, Feb. 3rd, it should not have run.
Also, to make it more interesting, there are references to "Subject:
test.list.odu.edu mailing list memberships reminder" when there should
not have been.  I searched the entire file system for test.list.odu.edu
but could not find where it was configured.  I even ran `strings' on the
binaries but could not find it.  

My questions are:

1) Why did mailman send out the password reminders, when they shouldn't
have?  As a FYI, I did not add a mailman crontab as the mailman crontab
on Red Hat runs out of /etc/cron.d.

2) Why did the messages contain any reference to test.list.odu.edu?
Where could this information be define?

You answers are appreciated.

Darren
Old Dominion University