Re: [gentoo-user] Mailman trouble

[David Relson]

On Thu, 14 Feb 2008 15:04:59 +0100
Johannes Skov Frandsen wrote:

> Hi
>
> For some reason my mailman has stopped responding... probably after a
> upgrade but I'm not sure.
>
> I can't seem to start or stop mailman...
>
> # /etc/init.d/mailman stop
>  * Stopping mailman
> ...
> [ !! ]
> # /etc/init.d/mailman start
>  * WARNING:  mailman has already been started.
>
> I tried to start mailman manually with '/usr/lib/mailman/mailmanctl
> start' but got this error:
>
> Site list is missing: mailman
>
> Then I ask mailman to display my lists with  '/usr/lib/mailman/bin/
> list_lists' which gave me this response:
>
> No matching mailing lists found
>
> which is somewhat odd as I checked that the lists was located where
> they have been the whole time at '/usr/local/mailman/lists/' which
> was the case.
>
> I have tried to kill all mailman processes but without any luck in
> regards to starting the service again.
>
> My best bet is that I have missed some crucial change when  accepted
> changes to a conf file after an upgrade using dispatch-conf, but I
> have no idea which.
>
> Anybody had the same problem and found a solution?
>
> Worst case scenario, how do I move my existing lists to a fresh
> installation of mailman?

A couple of thoughts:

Perhaps an upgrade now has mailman looking in /usr/mailman/lists rather
than /usr/local/mailman/lists

I often run "strace -feopen program ..." to determine what files
'program' is opening (or attempting to open).  Doing that can help find
out where mailman is looking for its lists.

Lastly, configuration files are so important that I save copies of
working versions.  When something breaks, at least I can compare the
b0rked versions to working versions.  Any version control system (rcs,
csv, subversion, ...) would work for this.

HTH,

David
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