[Mailman-Users] control mail distribution ..

[Khalil Abbas]

well I did send an old error file cause the current one is huge..

I think mailman keeps stopping because I reboot the servers everyday to free up the memory.. I have a TV station as a customer having 6 lists with a total of 300,000 subscribers, 50,000 each on the following server:

Centos
CPU Intel P4 3000
2 GBs RAM
120 Gbs hard drive

and they post daily to their lists..

I also have another local Newspaper as a customer having about 100,000 subscribers on 3 lists with a virtual private server with the following specs:
Centos
256 MBs Ram
10 GBs Hard drive 

which I have a hard time cleaning up because of the little space that keeps filling up..

is that the problem? do I need to use bigger hardware ?

another thing, the servers doesn’t send directly, the messages are being sent to my hosting servers provider's relay server..

Thanks for everything..



-----Original Message----- 
From: Mark Sapiro 
Sent: Sunday, January 23, 2011 4:02 AM 
To: Khalil Abbas 
Cc: mailman-users at python.org 
Subject: Re: [Mailman-Users] control mail distribution .. 

On 1/21/2011 1:15 AM, Khalil Abbas wrote:
> well, attached are parts of the error and qrunner logs.. I also forgot
> to mention that I also delete the following files:
>  
> rm /var/lib/mailman/data/*.pck -f

This was covered in my reply at
<http://mail.python.org/pipermail/mailman-users/2011-January/071032.html>

> rm /var/lock/mailman/*.* -f

Doing this also removes the master lock whose purpose is to prevent you
from starting multiple sets of qrunners. This is bad.


> the first one also eats up my little space on the hard drive, and the
> other locks the lists n they can’t send..


Also, if lists are being left locked by dead processes, this indicates
there are other problems. Do you suffer frequent power outages?


> what I need to know, why the subscribers are being removed? is it
> because of misconfiguration of mailman? or because of outside MTA’s like
> yahoo and hotmail rejecting mail from my servers because I need to
> control the flow of messages going out from my servers?


You also need to know the underlying causes of all the anomalous things
that are occurring in your installation. There are serious problems.
Your logs may help. Also see FAQs <http://wiki.list.org/x/_4A9> for info
on completely stopping Mailman and starting only after completely
stopped and <http://wiki.list.org/x/noA9> for lock information.

If you set bounce_notify_owner_on_disable to Yes on your lists, the list
owner will be sent a notice whenever a member's delivery is disabled by
bounce. This notice will contain the triggering bounce message. That
should help you diagnose the cause.


> another thing worth to mention, the servers are not blocked by hotmail
> because I sent single test messages from all my servers to some of my
> subscribers that were removed from my lists and they received them with
> no problems..


Possibly your MTA is treating the "temporary failure" throttling status
used by some large ISPs to rate limit your mail as a hard failure and
returning a failure DSN to Mailman.

The only thing in your error log was one unparseable message which has
nothing to do with any of this.

>From your qrunner log, I see a SIGHUP from log rotation at Jan 16
04:02:54 2011. Then Mailman is stopped at Jan 16 18:17:53 2011, and
started at Jan 16 18:19:41 2011.

Then I see

Jan 17 00:08:48 2011 (2666) Master qrunner detected subprocess exit
(pid: 2712, sig: 6, sts: None, class: BounceRunner, slice: 1/1) [restarting]

which says BounceRunner died with Signal 6 (SIGABRT). If it wasn't
manually killed, there should be a corresponding error log entry, but
the only entry in the error log you provided is from Dec 26 which
indicates you weren't looking at the current error log.

Then we see a sequence

Jan 17 17:11:34 2011 Mailman stopped

Jan 17 17:13:29 2011 Mailman started

Jan 17 20:29:32 2011 Mailman stopped

Jan 17 20:31:34 2011 Mailman started

Why all the stopping and starting?

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