-- Mark Sapiro <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> is rumored to have mumbled on 20. Mai
2008 10:52:34 -0700 regarding Re: [Mailman-Users] Is it possible that a
list loses its members?:
| I'm at a loss to explain what might have happened. Any ideas?
I can't explain what happened, but the only way I can see something like
this happening is if there was a failure in list locking.
Right, that's what we thought ourselves. The member adding is logged and we
verifed that the notification mails got sent, but it appears that both
those actions occur *before* the members are actually added.
I.e. if some
other process was updating the list at the same time that add_members
was running and the other process locked the list first, then
add_members locked the list, added the members and saved and unlocked
the list, and finally the other process saved the list without the
members.
The other process would probably(?) be the config_list command. Some more
detail. We found the following just before the list was created:
May 09 14:54:25 2008 (10586) admin.py access for non-existent list: listname
May 09 14:54:25 2008 (11122) admin.py access for non-existent list: listname
The member adding happened just two minutes later:
May 09 14:56:29 2008 (13495) listname: new [EMAIL PROTECTED],
Now the script we use to create new lists does this:
new_list();
write_config_file();
config_list();
add_members();
demod_members();
send_mail();
new_list() calls newlist, config_list() calls config_list, and
add_members() calls add_members - not much of a surprise, I guess.
I don't think this can result from a simple failure of some process to
lock the list since an unlocked list cannot be saved, and locking a list
refreshes the data. If there is an issue, it has to be in the locking
mechanism itself, but this seems sound and there are no known issues
with this, although coincidentally (and I'm sure it's just a rare and
strange coincidence) I saw an apparent locking failure last week. See
<http://mail.python.org/pipermail/mailman-developers/2008-May/020190.html
>.
So now we have two reports of possible locking failures. We'll have to
keep watching.
There were instances before where listowner talked of strange phenomena,
but there never was any proof. I admit I never believed them ...
--
Sebastian Hagedorn - Listmaster - RZKR-R1 (Flachbau), Zimmer 18
Zentrum für angewandte Informatik - Universitätsweiter Service RRZK
Universität zu Köln / Cologne University - Tel. +49-221-478-5587
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