[Mailman-Users] Making sure MailMan is running...

[Larry Stone]

On Thu, 13 Dec 2007, Jason Pruim wrote:

> I have looked around on the web and haven't found any info that I
> understand about making sure that mailman is receiving and sending e-
> mail that is sent into it. I just had a situation where on my site
> (With real low volume lists) that it was not sending mail since the 11
> of december...
>
> Would it be best to watch for the qrunner process and make sure that's
> running? Or is there a better way? I'm planning on writing this into a
> Widget (For all you Macintosh people out there) if I can find a good
> way to make sure this is up and running.

Is this for Mac OS X? It's not clear although you made the reference to
Macintoshes above.

I don't know anything about writing OS X widgets but as I've had an issue
with Mailman not starting reliably under Leopard, I set up a cron job to
run hourly and let me know if all the qrunners aren't there. It's pretty
simple:

#!/bin/sh
QRUNNERS=`ps -efw | grep -v grep | grep -c Python | awk '{ print $1 }'`

if [ $QRUNNERS != 9 ] ; then
  {
    echo "Mailman qrunner problem" | /usr/sbin/sendmail me at mydomain.com
  }
fi

Note that despite the "sendmail" command used there, that's really Postfix
as Postfix used the command "sendmail" (for Sendmail compatibility) as a
means of injecting mail. Note also that as written, the mail message will
be missing all RFC required headers but as it's going to myself, I don't
care. You could, of course, do something else there to provide
notification.

-- Larry Stone
   lstone19 at stonejongleux.com