[Mailman-Users] recovering from a "no space left on device" error

[Wallace Winfrey]

Earlier this morning the partition containing our mailman install
(including archives) filled up. We were alerted to this by error
messages being returned when trying to send emails. We cleared up some
disk space, but did not restart mailman. Users no longer got the error
message when posting to a list, so I figured all was well, and moved on
to other tasks.

A couple hours ago, a list member alerted me that the lists didn't seem
to be sending out any mail. I checked the folder of what is normally a
75-100 message a day list and saw that no messages had been sent since
the disk space issue. I restarted mailman, but it seems that the posts
sent since the disk space issue was cleared up are going out very
slowly. This is to be expected somewhat, but I was wondering if there
was anything I could do to accelerate the process.

Currently, qfiles/out has 158 .pck files. When I restarted mailman an
hour ago, it was at 161. Assuming that mailman processes .pck files
chronologically, it appears that only 15 messages have come into
qfiles/out in the last hour, while 18 have gone out. Like I said, is
there any way to expedite the out queue?

Many of my qfiles directories have 0-length pck.tmp files:

- qfiles/in has 398 0-length pck.tmp files (168 from today)
- qfiles/bounces has 342 0-length pck.tmp files
- qfiles/commands has 178 0-length pck.tmp files

Is it ok to remove these? If so, is there a special way to remove them,
like bin/discard for heldmsgs? I assume these 0-length files were
created when the disk ran out of space.

Also, qfiles/shunt currently has 11081 pickle files in it. I examined a
few of them at random, and they all appear to be spam - some go back as
far as 2006. Is there a proper way to clear out my qfiles/shunt
directory as well? I did, of course, run unshunt, which temporarily
cleared out the directory, but then repopulated it again after adding a
few MB to the end of my mailman/logs/error file.

I imagine I can just rm the 0-length files without issue, but manually
removing .pck files from the data directory in the past has caused me
headaches, so I wanted to make sure.

Anything else mailman-related I should take into consideration after
running out of disk space?

cheers

w