Bug#355637: [Pkg-mailman-hackers] Bug#355637: mailman: Stale lock files break administrative web interface

[Lionel Elie Mamane]

tags 355637 +upstream

thank you for your bug report.

On Mon, Mar 06, 2006 at 12:55:44PM -0800, Shannon Dealy wrote:

> Under some circumstances (presumably mailman software or system
> crashes), list specific stale lock files are left in the directory
> /var/lib/mailman/locks this can permanently prevent administrative
> login for that specific list until the lock file(s) are
> removed. There appears to be no mechanism to cleanup these stale
> lock files, and restarting mailman or even rebooting the system does
> not clean things up.  At the very least restarting mailman should
> cleanup these stale lock files,

What do you mean with "restarting mailman"? The only interpretation I
can find is restarting the queue daemon (the effect of
"/etc/init.d/mailman restart"). But there is still the Apache (or
other http server) running mailman CGIs. I don't think that merely
restarting the mailman queue daemon should summarily remove the lock
files: Apache is still running, and may be running a Mailman CGI
genuinely holding that lock for an operation.

> in particular what I assume is the master lock: listname.lock and
> probably the actual source of my problems.  A better solution would
> probably include actually checking the lock files periodically to
> make sure they are still valid.

Yes.

You may be hit by something like
http://mail.python.org/pipermail/mailman-developers/2006-January/018506.html

Upstream doesn't seem very eager to track down that kind of issues :-(

-- 
Lionel