[Mailman-Users] Mailman DOA after power outage crash.

[Mark Sapiro]

J.A. Terranson wrote:
>
>	We had a series of longer than battery outages on wednesday, and 
>when we came back online, mailman refused to run.  Heres the messages:
>
>mailman# tail -f error
>Oct 30 02:28:06 2010 (11862) couldn't load config file 
>/usr/mailman/lists/[listname]/config.pck.last 1778451844
>
>Oct 30 02:28:06 2010 (11862) couldn't load config file 
>/usr/mailman/lists/[listname]/config.db
>[Errno 2] No such file or directory: 
>'/usr/mailman/lists/[listname]/config.db'
>
>Oct 30 02:28:06 2010 (11862) couldn't load config file 
>/usr/mailman/lists/[listname]/config.db.last
>[Errno 2] No such file or directory: 
>'/usr/mailman/lists/[listname]/config.db.last'
>
>Oct 30 02:28:06 2010 (11862) All [listname]B fallbacks were corrupt, 
>giving up
>
>Oct 30 02:28:06 2010 (11862) error opening list: [listname]
>[Errno 2] No such file or directory: 
>'/usr/mailman/lists/[listname]/config.db.last'
>
>Please tell me theres a reasonable recovery for this on 2.1.21 (plus a 
>patch)?


2.1.12?

The recovery is to restore the corrupt
/usr/mailman/lists/[listname]/config.pck from the most recent good
backup.

Mailman does the best it can by trying to first write
config.pck.tmp.<hostname>.<pid> and then removing config.pck.last,
moving config.pck to config.pck.last and finally moving
config.pck.tmp.<hostname>.<pid> to config.pck.

You could check for a
/usr/mailman/lists/[listname]/config.pck.tmp.<hostname>.<pid> file and
try moving that to /usr/mailman/lists/[listname]/config.pck if it
exists, but even if it does, it may be bad too.

It appears that your system is caching disk writes to the extent that
both the config.pck and config.pck.last were incompletely written when
the power failed. You might look into that, and also consider setting

SYNC_AFTER_WRITE = Yes

in mm_cfg.py (see the documentation of this in Defaults.py).

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