[Mailman-Developers] Strange problem after a year of service

[Dan Wilder]

On Wed, Jan 16, 2002 at 08:01:35AM -0500, Barry A. Warsaw wrote:
> 
> >>>>> "DW" == Dan Wilder <wilder@eskimo.com> writes:
> 
>     DW> If you can get to the mail logs on the server (someplace in
>     DW> /var/log/ maybe, often called "mail." something, and do a
>     DW> "tail -f logfilename" while you send some mail to the list,
>     DW> you can sometimes gain some insights.
> 
> Yep, also check the Mailman logs in $prefix/logs and check the Mailman
> queue $prefix/qfiles.  What version of Mailman?  What version of
> Python?  Did any of these change?  Did they upgrade any system
> software?  Did they muck with cron?  Maybe your crontab entries got
> wasted.
> 
> >>>>> "PTS" == Pro-phile Technology Solutions <mailman@pro-phile.com> writes:
> 
>     PTS> I recently upgraded my server space (about 2:30 today) and
>     PTS> the list stopped working at about 2:30 today. Hmmmm. They
>     PTS> (the techs) said that the only thing they did was allocate
>     PTS> more space on the servers I was on for me to use and they
>     PTS> touched nothing else.
> 
> As a former (and sometimes current reluctant) sysadmin, I just don't
> believe this. :)  It's too suspicious.

As a current sysadmin, amen!

The original querant had emailed me personally and I replied
without thinking to copy the list.  I'd suggested he check
cron, both the crontab (or /etc/cron*/whatever) entry for
qrunner, to see whether it had been deleted, and the cron daemon.
Sometimes after a severe clock-shaking it's useful to 
"killall -HUP crond" to get it moving again.

Of course the prudent sysadmin would reboot at that point,
as crond isn't the only daemon that'll sulk following
a period of temporal chaos.  Postfix is my favorite; short of
reboot, I'll always do a "postfix reload" following a significant
clock jump on a server I can't reboot at that time.

-- 
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 Dan Wilder <dan@ssc.com>   Technical Manager & Editor
 SSC, Inc. P.O. Box 55549   Phone:  206-782-8808
 Seattle, WA  98155-0549    URL http://embedded.linuxjournal.com/
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