[Mailman-Users] Problems starting mailman

[Mark Sapiro]

Svancara, Randall wrote:
>
>I have configured mailman on Solaris 10 working with Postfix.  I am
>currently receiving the following error message while trying to start
>mailman:
>
>Traceback (most recent call last):
>  File "/local/software/mailman/bin/mailmanctl", line 547, in ?
>    main()
>  File "/local/software/mailman/bin/mailmanctl", line 389, in main
>    lock = acquire_lock(force)
>  File "/local/software/mailman/bin/mailmanctl", line 213, in
>acquire_lock
>    lock = acquire_lock_1(force)
>  File "/local/software/mailman/bin/mailmanctl", line 205, in
>acquire_lock_1
>    hostname, pid, tempfile = get_lock_data()
>  File "/local/software/mailman/bin/mailmanctl", line 173, in
>get_lock_data
>    pid = int(parts[-1])
>ValueError: null byte in argument for int()


It appears you have corrupt data in Mailman's locks/master-qrunner file.

Assuming there are no mailman processes running at all, you can just
'rm locks/*' and that should avoid the problem.

Note that a typical mailmanctl lock is a pair of files named

master-qrunner

and

master-qrunner.<hostname>.<pid>

each with contents

/path/to/locks/master-qrunner.<hostname>.<pid>[user at host locks]

In your case, it appears that the lock files exist, but a numeric <pid>
can't be parsed from the contents.

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