[Mailman-Users] Mailman is no longer gatewaying news...

[Mark Sapiro]

Grant Taylor wrote:
>
>I can say that I have received an error (that for some reason did not 
>show up in logs) from gate_news:
>
>Traceback (most recent call last):
>   File "/usr/local/mailman/cron/gate_news", line 284, in ?
>     main()
>   File "/usr/local/mailman/cron/gate_news", line 266, in main
>     clearcache()
>   File "/usr/local/mailman/cron/gate_news", line 121, in clearcache
>     conn.quit()
>   File "/usr/lib/python2.3/nntplib.py", line 564, in quit
>     resp = self.shortcmd('QUIT')
>   File "/usr/lib/python2.3/nntplib.py", line 260, in shortcmd
>     return self.getresp()
>   File "/usr/lib/python2.3/nntplib.py", line 215, in getresp
>     resp = self.getline()
>   File "/usr/lib/python2.3/nntplib.py", line 207, in getline
>     if not line: raise EOFError
>EOFError
>
>Unfortunately this does not mean much to me.  Will someone with more 
>Mailman-fu than I translate it?


You may have never seen this because it may be a one-time transient
error. Or, if it did show up from cron, it would probably be emailed
as output from the cron, which would be sent to 'mailman' unless you
have a MAILTO in the crontab, and depending on how your 'mailman' site
list is set up, you may never see it.

In any case, the above error says gate_news is closing the connection
to the news server, and the underlying Python nntplib received no
response to the QUIT command it sent to the server.

As far as your actual problem is concerned, since gate_news is being
run, I am guessing that for some reason, the messages were renumbered
on the news server and the current message numbers are all less than
the list's usenet_watermark. If this is the case, you have a couple of
choices.

You can do a mass_catchup from the list's Mail<->News gateways page. If
the watermark is the issue, this will allow news->mail to begin again,
but previously posted news that hasn't been gated will be lost.

To avoid losing messages, you would need to access the news server and
determine the current number of the last gated message and use
Mailman's bin/withlist or bin/config_list to set the list's
usenet_watermark to that value.

-- 
Mark Sapiro <mark at msapiro.net>        The highway is for gamblers,
San Francisco Bay Area, California    better use your sense - B. Dylan