[Mailman-Users] /var/lib/mailman/archives/private 90% full

[Mark Sapiro]

Sandi Gruver wrote:
>
>It's not clear to me even after reading MM archive posts how to contain this filesystem - /var/lib/mailman/archives/private.
>
>So I go in and manually gzip the <listname>.mbox/<listname>.mbox file, but that doesn't stop the growth.


No, and if I understand correctly, you now have a relatively useless
<listname>.mbox/<listname>.mbox file containing a gzipped mbox with
additional text appended to it.


>Yesterday I read about not gzipping the <listname>/2009-December.txt files so turned that off in mailman's cron.
>But ... 
>
>104 lists on RedHat EL4 server.
>
>Thank you for simple, clear ideas, I'm not a programmer nor much of a techie.


If you don't have enough storage to support your archives, perhaps you
should either get more or turn archiving off.

The point of an archive is to archive messages. By its nature, it grows
with time.

Now that you're not gzipping the periodic .txt files, you can do

 rm /path/to/archives/private/*/*.txt.gz

to remove all the old, redundant gzipped files.

If you want to delete older messages from the pipermail archive, you
can do something like, e.g.

  rm -r /path/to/archives/private/*/1997*
  rm -r /path/to/archives/private/*/attachments/1997*
  rm -r /path/to/archives/private/*/database/1997*

This will remove all of 1997. The only problem is that the archive
table of contents will still have links to those nonexistent pages.

Another method is to edit the
/path/to/archives/private/<listname>.mbox/<listname>.mbox files and
remove older messages from the beginning of the file leaving only the
newer messages at the end, and then run Mailman's

  bin/arch --wipe listname. This will leave a consistent archive, but
it will renumber all the messages and break any saved links or links
in archived messages to other archived messages.

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