[Outages-discussion] Mailman web interface broken

[Jared Mauch]

On Apr 16, 2013, at 12:43 PM, Jeremy Chadwick <jdc at koitsu.org> wrote:

> It looks like mailman broke.  Again.  :-(
> 
> This is also the cause of all the influx of mails within the past few
> minutes.  It takes careful review of SMTP headers (specifically
> reviewing Received: lines, and/or looking at the Date: header (which is
> sent by the client)) to figure out.
> 
> Jared, have you talked to the mailman folks about this recurring
> problem?
> 
> freebsd.org's mailing lists are all Mailman 2.1.14 and have never seen
> this kind of issue.  Whether or not 2.1.15 has a problem that 2.1.14
> lacks is unknown to me.
> 
> All I could find recently on the mailman-users list is these:
> 
> http://mail.python.org/pipermail/mailman-users/2013-April/074920.html
> http://mail.python.org/pipermail/mailman-users/2013-April/074960.html

What's happening is that some of the files are getting owned by the wrong user.  This last case it was because of an upgrade from 2.1.14 -> 2.1.15.  I didn't check every list, but for some reason the $mailman/list/outages* stuff ended up owned by root when the others (eg: cisco-nsp, cisco-voip, etc..) were working just fine.

I'm very frustrated with this as I didn't see these types of problems on FreeBSD but w/ Linux I seem to have this happen fairly often.

The reason all these messages came out of the woodwork is I ran a bin/unshunt to get them out.

Normally I break it around the first of the month when I manually remove the users that mailman can't auto-remove and I get from 50-1000 bounced emails to the -owner alias based on the lists and monthly reminders.

*sigh*

- Jared