[Mailman-Users] weird locking problems

[Dan Mick]

> 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).

What you're seeing is that the lock file timestamp is in the future,
and that's by design; the file timestamp is used as the 'expiration
time' to break stale locks.  It's normal behavior.  Do you think
it's causing problems?

(This 'feature' of ls is not well known, but that's what it does
for times in the future.)