I'm pleased to report my mailman archive update process is working again. As it turned out, what was keeping the feature from working was ownership and/or permissions on files in /usr/mailman/archives/private/[LISTNAME] and /usr/mailman/archives/private/[LISTNAME]/database directories. Somehow, (I'm not sure how) many -- but not all -- files in those directories were owned by root rather than by mailman and many of them also had permissions of 644 (rw-r--r--) RATHER than 664 (rw-rw-r--). That has been corrected now and ALL files in the mailman directory structure are now owned by mailman PLUS the permissions on virtually all data files are 664 and not 644.
This issue apparently goes back to when mailman was first laid down on our old server in the early summer; because a check of the last backup taken from the old server at the end of September shows ALL files in those directories were owned by root and not by mailman. That was CLEARLY caused by some error I made when installing and setting up mailman. I added, the "User warning for check_perms" because although the perms shown on that final old-server backup were 664 for all mailman files in /usr/mailman/archives/private/mylist directory and 660 for all files in /usr/mailman/archives/private/mylist/database and check_perms reported "No Problems Found", check_perms was flat wrong about that. The ownership on ALL those files was wrong but check_perms failed to detect and report that issue. This issue has been reported and should soon be fixed. But in the meantime be cautions about putting too much faith in check_perms in mailman v2.1.11. The data files in those directories must ALL be owned by mailman. In our case they were owned by ROOT! That prevented mailman's ARCHrunner from updating the archive and produced the same errors every day for almost 3 months when mailman tried to update the archive. The errors were recorded each day in the mailman error log (/usr/local/mailman/logs/error); but I never checked the error log! Duhhh! Also, because of those errors the archives were not updated for 3 months and mailman's automatic cleanup process was systematically discarding ALL new posts that hadn't been updated after 7 days. Sadly, neither I nor anyone else was checking the archive either. Double Duhhh!! So, in the end we lost 3 months worth of archive updates. The lessons here are: 1. Just because check_perms reports "No Problems Found", don't assume everything is set right or working correctly. CHECK THE ERROR LOG and CHECK THE ARCHIVES! Then, DOUBLE-CHECK both the file and directory permissions and OWNERSHIPs in the archive directories for each of your mailman lists. There is a post in the archives that briefly explains exactly what permissions should be for both files and directories. You'll find that post here: <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/mailman-users/2008-October/063748.html>. 2. If you don't understand why your list's permissions and ownerships are set the way they are, keep asking questions until you DO understand. Otherwise you may wake up one day as I did and need to explain to your client why 3 months of their conversations have unexpectedly gone missing. :-( A word to the wise. ------------------------------------------------------ Mailman-Users mailing list Mailman-Users@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users Mailman FAQ: http://wiki.list.org/x/AgA3 Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-users/archive%40jab.org Security Policy: http://wiki.list.org/x/QIA9
