[Mailman-Users] weird locking problems

[Will Yardley]

i've been having some problems with our mailman installation at the
office.  it's mailman 2.0.8 from the debian package (so the installation
is a bit weird, to conform with debian policy etc. etc.), but seems to
work pretty well most of the time.

the archives are from an older mailman installation, and are mounted
over NFS on a filer (which tends to crap out occasionally).  i'm moving
the files to a slightly less crappy filer, which might help somewhat...

anyway the problem is that there are lock files, which don't have a date
or time on them.  if i create files in that directory, they have a date
/ time as they should, but the lock files look like:
-rw-rw-r--    2 list     list           41 Mar 29  2002 adm.lock
-rw-rw-r--    2 list     list           41 Mar 29  2002 adm.lock.ladd.9136
-rw-rw-r--    1 list     list           41 Mar 29  2002 adm.lock.ladd.9249

if i do:
% touch booger
i get:
-rw-r--r--    1 root     list            0 Mar 29 17:26 booger

my guess is this is because of NFS. the time on the two machines is
synchronized via NTP, so the time on both machines is the same. the
locks directory itself (and all of the other mailman directories) are on
a local drive - just the archive and mbox files are mounted via NFS.
 
generally, removing the locks fixes the problem (which happens once or
twice a day).

-- 
Will Yardley
input: william < @ hq . newdream . net . >