[Mailman-Users] Upgrade to 2.1.4 failed - user lost - recover via backup unsuccessful - any ideas?

[Alex Dupont]

Hello,


I'm a "bit" in a loss here: I was running Mailman 2.1.2 on Debian 3.0
with no problems. Using apt-get... to upgrade Mailman to 2.1.4
produced an error. Well, besides the fact that all my archives got
deleted (why would a script (!) do that??), I finally got Mailman back
up and running version 2.1.4. I had to fix a zillion permissions, and
it took me forever. Probably not a Mailman-thing, I know, and the
package-maintainer isn't my friend, I can tell you that. But the
following should be only Mailman-related:

After having fixed the web_page issue I could even access my lists.
All of them. But then the disaster: I have lost some 3.500 subscribers
in 3 different lists. Many other lists have been untouched, at least
no loss there. I do not understand why only those 3 were affected any
why anything got lost there in the first place.

The status is, that I have a config.pck that is way smaller than my
old ones in backup (e.g. 163 KB versus 533 KB). I'm missing _a lot_ of
subscribers (plus of course the fact that now there are probably
people in the list again that had unsubscribed!) and I can't recover.
Why? Well, I thought that backing up /lists would be sufficient since
all relevant data is in those files. Apparently not!? When I copy my
old config.pck to the directory, overwriting the current (new) file
(permissions set to list:list, 0660), then that file gets stripped in
size when I save and/or start qrunner again. And of course the
memberlist is still the old, small one, and interestingly enough, the
settings (web_page_url e.g.) are lost even though that file should
have the settings in it as they were obviously correct before. I do
have config.pck.tmp.XXX-files which I tried to rename to config.pck.
Again, it gets stripped down and only has a totally outdated number of
subscribers. Why would that happen? What else could I do to recover
those thousands of lost subscribers? Where _exactly_ are those
addresses actually stored? Any why doesn't this seem to be
documented somewhere? I really searched pretty much everywhere. Barry
in
http://mail.python.org/pipermail/mailman-developers/2002-August/012795.html
didn't really help me.

I really would appreciate any help I can get. My lists are not for fun
and we need them. I still don't understand why the backup doesn't
help. But maybe I'm simply missing something.

Thank you very much, a very desperate

Alex