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

[Brad Knowles]

Grant Taylor wrote:

> Below are the top three and bottom three lines in the fromusenet log file.
> 
>    Oct 15 02:20:03 2008 (3687) comp.mail.sendmail: [20872..42079]
>    Oct 15 02:20:04 2008 (3687) nothing new for list comp.mail.sendmail
>    Oct 15 02:20:04 2008 (3687) comp.mail.sendmail watermark: 339203
>    ...
>    Nov 13 12:00:02 2008 (1003) comp.mail.sendmail: [20872..42368]
>    Nov 13 12:00:02 2008 (1003) nothing new for list comp.mail.sendmail
>    Nov 13 12:00:02 2008 (1003) comp.mail.sendmail watermark: 339203
> 
> Greping through the log file, it looks like the "watermark" has not 
> changed.  In fact the only thing that I see that has changed is the 
> second number (in the square brackets) on the first like of each log entry.

There's your problem.  Somehow your watermark got set ridiculously high, or 
the news server decided to re-number all their articles into a much lower 
range, and from now until the end of eternity, you're not going to find any 
"new" articles to pull out of the newsgroup and post to the list.

You're going to need to reset that watermark, if you want to get things 
working again.


You would need to talk to your news server administrator to see if they did 
a re-numbering, or silently switched you to be pointed at a different news 
server with a different article numbering, or what.

This is one of those cases where it helps to be the administrator of both 
sets of systems, so that you know what's going on under the hood on both 
ends of the connection, and you have full control over what changes are or 
are not made.


BTW, if you were using a server-style feed mechanism, there wouldn't be a 
watermark issue.

You would instead track incoming messages by their message-id and date 
headers, and if the message had a recent enough date header to be within 
your chosen window of operation, and you had not seen that message-id within 
that window of operation, and the message in question was posted on one of 
the newsgroups you're subscribed to, then you'd accept the message.

No watermarks here.

Of course, you continually purge old message-ids out of your database, but 
you do want to keep them for a while after the window has expired, in case 
someone takes an old feed and tries to re-submit it -- you want to be able 
to reject all those old re-posted articles.

> Understood.  If you will tell me what (and possibly how to get) you want 
> and I'll get it for you.

Mark Sapiro would be a much better person to have that part of the 
discussion with.  He's the lead developer for the 2.1 "stable" branch, and 
he would be able to tell you what you might need to do.

> Thank you for all your effort.

Please let us know how it goes.

-- 
Brad Knowles <brad at shub-internet.org>
LinkedIn Profile: <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu>