[Mailman-Users] Postings under one Mailman instance not seen by the other?

[Dwight A. Ernest]

I assist in the administration of several servers running Mailman, and have
been active in this way for longer than I care to remember. I got rusty in
the last few years, though, and during that period everything was ticking
along rather well.

I was recently called upon to assist following the migration of one such
Mailman instance from a server on which I'd patched it for various things
(like searchable archives, etc.), to a server on which it was running a
straight Redhat RPM version, with no patching. I was asked to retrofit the
patches to the new instance.

I approached it by pulling the patched sources over to the new server,
building them, and changing the path to the patched version, leaving the RPM
version in place. The data were kept in a directory tree separate from the
executables, which simplified things. After some trial and error, it
appeared to be working right.

I neglected, however, to change the home directory for the mailman user to
the new executable path. Another sysadmin, though aware of my work,
innocently executed ~mailman/bin/genaliases, which came from the old RPM
instance.

This caused the aliases file to grab the old path to the '.../mail/mailman
post' programs. List postings succeeded, according to the MTA logging, but
no postings actually went out. It took almost 24 hours for the problem to be
noticed, but only a few minutes to put it right.

In the meantime, over 200 posted messages were lost. I can't find any trace
of them in the qfiles directory. If possible, I'd love to find them and
process them under the patched MM instance. I don't understand what happened
to them. It seems to me that if the data repository was shared between the
two executables instances, there should be a good chance that they were
processed. I can find no trace in either the RPM-related log files, nor the
patched-source-related log files.

Ideas? Thanks.
-Dwight