[Mailman-Users] Mailman is no longer gatewaying news...

[Grant Taylor]

On 11/11/08 14:20, Brad Knowles wrote:
> If it had been problems with posting, I would have pointed at your cron 
> job.  Since it's problems with reading, that would imply some issue with 
> the news reader interface you've got.

What do you mean by "... news reader interface ..."?  Are you saying 
that the problem is with the news (NNTP) client that I'm using?  If so, 
I can say for sure that is not the case.  I have verified that the 
message(s) that I post to the mailing list are indeed being gatewayed to 
the news server as my posts appear in the news group like they should on 
other Usenet news (NNTP) servers.  I can also verify that the news 
server that Mailman posted to (and checks) has has my test message.  As 
such I do not believe the problem to be related to news (NNTP) but 
rather something with acting as a news (NNTP) client.

> Check your Mailman logs and the logs on the news server you're 
> connecting to.  You might also want to try firing up WireShark to see 
> the actual incoming and outgoing packets to the news server.

I did check the Mailman logs.  gate_news.cron.txt is empty, nor is there 
any output if I run gate_news by hand (as the user that owns Mailman). 
I did not see any thing in the other Mailman or system logs.  Do you 
have something I should be looking and / or greping for?

As far as Wireshark goes, I've already run TCPDump on the connection. 
That's how I can be sure that Mailman is connecting to the news server 
and issuing the "mode reader" command, selecting the news group, and 
getting information back from the news server.

Any other ideas?

I feel like this has to do with Mailman as an news (NNTP) client not 
realizing that it needs to download more messages (message counters off 
/ corrupted / something) or it not being able to download messages for 
some reason.

I can say that I have received an error (that for some reason did not 
show up in logs) from gate_news:

Traceback (most recent call last):
   File "/usr/local/mailman/cron/gate_news", line 284, in ?
     main()
   File "/usr/local/mailman/cron/gate_news", line 266, in main
     clearcache()
   File "/usr/local/mailman/cron/gate_news", line 121, in clearcache
     conn.quit()
   File "/usr/lib/python2.3/nntplib.py", line 564, in quit
     resp = self.shortcmd('QUIT')
   File "/usr/lib/python2.3/nntplib.py", line 260, in shortcmd
     return self.getresp()
   File "/usr/lib/python2.3/nntplib.py", line 215, in getresp
     resp = self.getline()
   File "/usr/lib/python2.3/nntplib.py", line 207, in getline
     if not line: raise EOFError
EOFError

Unfortunately this does not mean much to me.  Will someone with more 
Mailman-fu than I translate it?



Grant. . . .