[Mailman-Developers] I'm using 2.0.1, currently, I should have mentioned that.

Barry A. Warsaw barry@digicool.com
Tue, 13 Mar 2001 17:21:18 -0500


>>>>> "P" == Patriot  <room_maildev@bbs.pixel.citadel.org> writes:

    P>  I'm using 2.0.1, currently, I should have mentioned that.
    P> Thanks for getting back so quickly. :)
   
You hit me at a good time. :)
   
    P>  What I've been seeing is this (and please note, there's not
    P> timestamp on the lockfiles that are created, only a datestamp):
   
    P>  ~mailman/locks/gate_news.lock
    P> ~mailman/gate_news.lock.my.hostname.org.pid
  
    P>  And then also the newsgroup lock files.  Recently I've been
    P> having problems with my ISP's newsserver and all I'm seeing are
    P> the gate_news.lock files.  They don't seem to go away (but I
    P> have no way of PROVING that because there's no time stamps.

ls won't show you a timestamp because of the funky trick that LockFile
plays with them.  It actually uses an mtime in the future to indicate
the expected lifetime of the lock.  A bit cheesy but allows for much
more atomic lifetime setting than scribbling the timestamp into the
file.
   
    P>  However, I DID have one that was a day old, which is where I'm
    P> presuming this problem is coming from.  After I removed the
    P> lock, the next time gate_news runs it imports the newsgroups
    P> (assuming the news server is up).
 
Okay, so the gate_news lock is definitely outliving the process.  Note
if you waited long enough (10 hours <wink>) the lock would get broken
and things would start flowing again.
   
    P>  That's about the only place where I see the problem, and like
    P> I said, removing the lockfiles makes it work the next time
    P> around.  If I'm on the wrong track for debugging this let me
    P> know so I can take a look in the right place. :)

Check the logs/error file for entries that start with "gate_news".
Having the traceback will be essential in figuring out what's going
wrong.

-Barry