[Mailman-Users] Sanity-checking individual lists for health?

[Chris Waltham]

On Jul 24, 2007, at 10:46 PM, Mark Sapiro wrote:

> Chris Waltham wrote:
>>
>> I have been tasked with moving a Mailman 2.0.12 installation from a
>> Solaris (SPARC) server to a Linux (x86) server. The Linux server will
>> be receiving a copy of Mailman 2.1.9, so obviously I am making the
>> 2.0.x -> 2.1.x jump in there. Also, on Solaris, Mailman lives in /
>> home/mailman but on Linux I will be putting it in /blender/mailman
>> (and thus using move_list to update archives, fix_url, etc.)
>>
>> What makes this migration slightly tricky is that the server hosts
>> around 840 lists. Therefore, going through each list pre- and post-
>> migration by hand would be a little time-consuming for me, so I want
>> to avoid that where possible :-)I noticed that, when doing a "make
>> update" when installing 2.1.9, a couple of lists from 2.0.12 failed
>> the update process and I had to Control-C them for the process to
>> continue. I'm not sure what the exact problem was, hence I'm
>> wondering if there is any kind of check that I can run in a FOR loop
>> to verify a list's integrity. And, yes, I've run check_db and
>> check_perms and neither report problems, this just seems to be a
>> handful of lists out of the 800-odd that seem a little flaky.
>
>
> There is little you can do to verify the integrity of a list other  
> than
> trying to instantiate it which will also update it if necessary (and
> possible). check_perms only checks permissions (and it has a bug
> regarding archives/private). check_db only checks that list data can
> be loaded from lists/<listname>/config.* files. It doesn't sanity
> check the result.
>
> Do you know which lists failed in bin/update (run by make update)? If
> so do these lists have lists/<listname>/config.pck files which are
> converted from the config.db files and indicate the conversion of the
> list data was probably successful. In any case, are there any lists
> that don't have lists/<listname>/config.pck files? These would be the
> problem lists.

One list that failed both "make update" and the below-mentioned  
"config_list" is named "bowsun". Here is a copy of its contents:

drwxrwsr-x    2 mailman mailman   4096 Jul 24 11:03 ./
drwxrwsr-x  844 mailman mailman  65536 Jul 24 11:01 ../
-rwxr-xr--    1 mailman mailman   1692 Jul 30  2003  
admindbpreamble.html*
-rwxr-xr--    1 mailman mailman    357 Jan 19  2001 archives.html*
-rw-rw----    1 root    mailman  15076 Jul 23 15:37 config.db
-rw-rw----    1 mailman mailman  15075 Jun 29 07:03 config.db.last
-rw-rw----    1 root    mailman  12578 Jul 24 11:03 config.pck
-rw-rw----    1 root    mailman  12578 Jul 24 10:51 config.pck.last
-rwxr-xr--    1 mailman mailman    189 Jan 19  2001 handle_opts.html*
-rwxr-xr--    1 mailman mailman   1026 Jan 19  2001 headfoot.html*
-rwxr-xr--    1 mailman mailman   3136 Jan 19  2001 listinfo.html*
-rwxr-xr--    1 mailman mailman   4106 Jan 19  2001 options.html*
-rw-rw-r--    1 root    mailman 443875 Jul 24 08:41 request.pck
-rwxr-xr--    1 mailman mailman   1169 Jan 19  2001 roster.html*
-rwxr-xr--    1 mailman mailman    198 Jan 19  2001 subscribe.html*

I'm not sure how to start troubleshooting that one..?

> One way to do a better sanity check or problem detection on these (or
> even on all) lists is
>
>   bin/config_list -i /dev/null listname
>
> This will attempt to instantiate the list and if it's a 2.0.12 list
> convert the data in config.db and save as config.pck.

Okay great, I'm giving that a try now in the background.

> One bit of advice. Once the lists are all converted, remove the
> config.db and config.db.last files from the lists/<listname>/
> directories. If you don't do this, it is possible that at some future
> time, the config.pck and config.pck.last files could become corrupt
> and cause Mailman to fall back to the then ancient config.db.

Good tip, I'll be sure to use it! One thing I've noticed is a problem  
with genaliases. Going off this URL: http://acd.ucar.edu/~fredrick/ 
linux/mailman/upgrading.html it suggests running "genaliases", saving  
the output to a text file, and merging that with my current /etc/ 
aliases. However, when I run genaliases, it returns no output and no  
errors. Is there a place I should start troubleshooting that from?

Thanks!


Chris