[Mailman-Users] Tricky admin_immed_notify problem

[Mark Sapiro]

Savoy, Jim wrote:
>
>   The answers to your questions are: yes, yes & yes. But I don't think
>the person
>who installed Mailman many years ago ever did the "crontab -u mailman
>crontab.in"
>bit, so I just did it now. First I commented out everything in that
>crontab.in file
>except the checkdbs line, and set that to run immediately. It worked
>like a charm
>and sent out hundreds of reminders to all list owners.
>
>  I am not all that familiar with cron. Is that "crontab -u mailman
>crontab.in"
>something you need to run every time you reboot the system? Or does it
>add something
>to /etc/cron.d or /etc/cron.daily or /etc/crontab? (I don't see anything
>new in those).


As you discovered it puts the commands from crontab.in into the mailman
user's crontab which is likely /var/spool/cron/mailman. It stays there
across boots.

This is the correct place for the mailman crontab. The ones in cron.d
are a slightly different format.

But note, that almost all the jobs in crontab.in should be run. They
all have a function and the only one you can safely ignore is
gate_news if you aren't running any lists with a news->mail gateway.

For the others, you need to at least read the comments in crontab.in
and understand what the job does before deciding not to run it.


>  But I noticed that many of the reminders it sent out, pointing people
>to the
>admindb page were blank (ie there is nothing pending).


Presumably these are the "-1 requests" ones you refer to later.

This issue only existed with lists that were migrated from pre 2.1.5 to
2.1.5 and only exists in 2.1.5.

Yes, visiting the list's admindb page should fix it, but that needs to
be done for each list with the problem.

I have just created a withlist script you can run to fix all the
problem lists. See <http://www.msapiro.net/scripts/fix_minus_one.py>.

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