[Mailman-Users] Problem Reaching Just One List

[Gary Gaydos]

| Greetings Folks,
|
| I currently run eight lists on with Mailman.
|
| Starting a couple of hours ago I could no longer get in to manage
ONE of 
| the lists.  When I say get in, I mean that I can not access the Web 
| interface for that particular list. The server simply churns and
churns and 
| churns but nothing ever comes up on the screen.

<snip>
|
| Any ideas?

Sounds like you have a stale lock for that list.

>From the mailman faq:
Q. Why do my web pages hang? 
A. CERN Web servers might leave Python processes running, and in some
cases might hang the CGI
completely. In that case, switch to Apache. 

It is also possible that you have stale locks. Mailman tries to be
very careful about the lock files it creates to
ensure the integrity of its databases, but sometimes system faults can
cause stale locks to persist. Look in
$prefix/locks for any stale list locks and remove them (you can
determine if they're stale by getting the pid
from the file contents and using ps to see if those processes are
still running or not). 


I've seen stale locks occur for two reasons that I
can identify.

1) corrupt cookies in users browser, clear them
2) I believe versions of mailman prior to 2.0.6 had
a stale lock problem when a list had a large number 
of subscribers and a user would stop the browser from
loading before the webpage completely downloaded.
I haven't seen this problem with mailman 2.0.6 or 2.0.7

Hope this helps,
Gary

-- 
Regards, Gary Gaydos
IBM Linux Technology Center