[Mailman-Users] Lists periodically vanishing

[Tom Maddox]

Hi, everyone,

I've just been assigned the task of managing an existing mailman 
installation, and it's evidently been having a recurring problem with 
lists mysteriously vanishing for some short period of time and then 
reappearing, occasionally in a corrupted state (membership list and 
config settings hosed, etc.)

The symptoms I've observed are as follows:

1)  Mail sent to a list will bounce with a message like the following:

    ----- The following addresses had permanent fatal errors -----
<list at company.com>
     (reason: Data format error)

    ----- Transcript of session follows -----
list: Mailbox does not exist
501 5.6.0 Data format error


2)  Attempting to access the archive web page for the list returns a 
"404 Not found" error, although it *is* possible to access the standard 
information page about the list.

Relevant system information:
FreeBSD 4.7-STABLE #0
sendmail 8.12.6
Mailman 2.0.8
The mailman archives are also being archived by mhonarc v.2.5.13; 
archiving by mhonarc happens every 15 minutes.  It scans for changes in 
the mailman archives and then updates its own copy as necessary (at 
least, that's how I think it works).  I would guess it's possible that 
mhonarc is locking the list archive file and causing concurrency issues 
and disruptions in the list as a result.

Any thoughts?

Thanks,

Tom