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

[Pro-phile Technology Solutions]

Thanks to all, here is the e-mail I received back from the techs:
Response: Honestly don't remember making any changes, while investigating
and checking file permissions ownership and other things, you got back to us
stating that it was working.  I can't take credit for something I honestly
don't think I fixed.
Support

Me: The only thing I did was pico into some of the files to check to see if
they were rewritten, corrupted, etc. I restarted the system about 5 times
and I also tailed the messages to see where they were going. Beyond that,
nothing was done. Things that make ya go hmmmmmmmmm.
Thanks for all of the immediate help out there. I'll archive this info on my
servers in case it happens again.
Thanks again all of you!
____________________
Brian
mailman@pro-phile.com

----- Original Message -----
From: "Dan Wilder" <dan@ssc.com>
To: <mailman-developers@python.org>
Sent: Wednesday, January 16, 2002 8:07 AM
Subject: Re: [Mailman-Developers] Strange problem after a year of service


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.

--
-----------------------------------------------------------------
 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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