mailman won't send digests daily - help?

[sneader]

Mailman doesn't seem to want to send digests each day, even though the list is configured to do so:

Should a digest be dispatched daily when the size threshold isn't reached? YES

The last digest it kicked out was sent today Feb 28th at 11:32AM local time (I thought digests were sent at Noon?) and contained messages dating back to Monday Feb 23rd.

My e-mail program thinks the digest is about 72kb, but maybe it is close to 100kb, the current digest limit.... so maybe it is only sending a digest when the size limit is reached?

Any help for this newbie?

- Scott

 

[sneader]

** bump **

Please, anyone have any ideas or where can I turn? The last digest I received from this one particular list had messages from March 9th through March 23rd. 36 messages, about 62kb in size. But I have MailMan configured for this list to send digests out daily!

Help?

- Scott

 

[texas critter]

Most likely your mailman cron job file has gotten wiped. You may need to reinstall the Mailman crontab.in to the cron jobs. These urls helped me solve the problem:

http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/faqw-mm.py?req=show&file=faq05.004.htp

http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg20256.html

http://www.kurtwerks.com/software/mailman.html
scroll down to #13

Keep in mind that the specific paths shown on these webpages may be different from your Mailman installation, you may need to modify them for your server.

 

[shaun]

whats the command below return

crontab -l -u mailman

 

[sneader]

First, I want to say that if you ever need cPanel licensing products (monthly with or without support, or yearly licenses, Shaun & Steve at CPLicensing are awesome -- great pricing & support!).

As far as the question, the output of that command is:

[email protected] [~]# crontab -l -u mailman
# DO NOT EDIT THIS FILE - edit the master and reinstall.
# (/dev/null installed on Wed Mar 17 02:53:21 2004)
# (Cron version -- $Id: crontab.c,v 2.13 1994/01/17 03:20:37 vixie Exp $)
[email protected] [~]#

 

[texas critter]

That means your Mailman cron job file is empty. Follow the info at the urls I posted above to reinstall your Mailman cron job and your daily digests will start coming again.

 

[shaun]

Check my response to the ticket you have open.

 

[sneader]

Thanks for helping out this newbie. What I am trying to understand is that here is the contents of usr/local/cpanel/src/3rdparty/gpl/mailman-2.1.3/cron/crontab.in:

MAILTO=postmaster
# At 8AM every day, mail reminders to admins as to pending requests.
# They are less likely to ignore these reminders if they're mailed
# early in the morning, but of course, this is local time...
0 8 * * * /usr/bin/python2 -S /usr/local/cpanel/3rdparty/mailman/cron/checkdbs
#
# At 9AM, send notifications to disabled members that are due to be
# reminded to re-enable their accounts.
0 9 * * * /usr/bin/python2 -S /usr/local/cpanel/3rdparty/mailman/cron/disabled
#
# Noon, mail digests for lists that do periodic as well as threshhold delivery.
0 12 * * * /usr/bin/python2 -S /usr/local/cpanel/3rdparty/mailman/cron/senddigests
#
# 5 AM on the first of each month, mail out password reminders.
0 5 1 * * /usr/bin/python2 -S /usr/local/cpanel/3rdparty/mailman/cron/mailpasswds
#
# Every 5 mins, try to gate news to mail. You can comment this one out
# if you don't want to allow gating, or don't have any going on right now,
# or want to exclusively use a callback strategy instead of polling.
#0,5,10,15,20,25,30,35,40,45,50,55 * * * * /usr/bin/python2 -S /usr/local/cpanel/3rdparty/mailman/cron/gate_news
#
# At 3:27am every night, regenerate the gzip'd archive file. Only
# turn this on if the internal archiver is used and
# GZIP_ARCHIVE_TXT_FILES is false in mm_cfg.py
27 3 * * * /usr/bin/python2 -S /usr/local/cpanel/3rdparty/mailman/cron/nightly_gzip

So, when you say my mailman cron is empty... how do I get the above to run?

Sorry for dumb questions! You are talking to an MCSE who is trying to get un-assimmilated.

- Scott

 

[texas critter]

You might check out Shaun's reply on your ticket first.

Or read these urls that I posted earlier, the answer is there, follow the instructions:

http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman...g/msg20256.html

http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/faqw-...e=faq05.004.htp

 

[sneader]

Thanks -- I sort of get it now... except. On one of the links above, the page says:

>> If you are using an older Mailman, like version 2.0.x,
>> then you forget to set up the crontab entries. Check the
>> Mailman's crontab:

And it goes on to have the same as what I'm being told to put into the crontab. But I am using Mailman 2.1 as far as I know, not version 2.0.

Oh well, maybe this is one of those that I won't wind up understanding, but will just do as told.

- Scott

 

[sneader]

Just to give some closure on this... for reasons unknown, the mailman cron job was missing. It was there, the digests had been working, but *poof* it was gone.

Thanks everyone for the clues to solve the mystery! Learning something everyday...

- Scott

 

[largolam]

About a month ago we had someone reporting their digest not working. We checked, and the mailman cron was empty. I copied it from another of our servers, and all was fine again.

Today they reported it again. And again I found it missing. But this time, it was missing on the first 'one of our other servers' I checked our other servers, and it appears that it has been killed on ALL two dozen or so of them.

I ran /scripts/reinstallmailman, and it has put it back. But perhaps a more serious question here - what is causing it to be blown away in the first place, on all of our servers. If it was just one, I would assume it was just a glitch on that one. But this appears to be something related to cpanel, since thats the only commonality on these servers. (The mailman cron is fine other servers, which are not running cpanel)

 

[sneader]

Thanks for letting me know that it's not just my machine!!!

Sorry for the newbie question, but can you tell me what you did to reinstall mailman? I wound up replacing the cron job, but it might be easier to just launch some script in the future to resolve this.

- Scott

 

[largolam]

" /scripts/reinstallmailman"

 

[sneader]

FYI, my mailman cron is EMPTY AGAIN!!!

This sucks.

EDIT: I ran /scripts/reinstallmailman and it's back again... let's see for how long. Any ideas why it is going away?

- Scott

 

[largolam]

I entered a ticket reporting this problem.

I gave the URL to this thread, and apparently the cpanel techs that answer tickets are unable (or unwilling) to copy/paste it and read the thread, since all I've gotten from them so far is:

> Please post the entire problem here, in this ticket.
> --
> Eric Gregory
> cPanel Support Staff
> Berwick, PA Office

I replied to that, copy/pasting the actual contents of this thread into the ticket, and it has gone unanswered so far (although their ticket system apparently didnt recognize that I *have* responded, and sent me another 'we are still waiting for your response' message - it should have sent that to the cpanel staff.

 

[sneader]

Thanks for doing that! Keep us posted.

Weird that they cannot deal with using their own support forum.

- Scott

 

[largolam]

"Keeping you posted" - theyve now asked for root access on our servers, which we refused to give, and are telling us they can't provide tech support without root access to our servers.

I've filed it as a bug. No idea how quickly that will garner a response. (Im not holding my breath)

http://bugzilla.cpanel.net/show_bug.cgi?id=263

[edit was to correct a typo]

 

[sneader]

Why not give them access, then change the password when done? If not, I can open a ticket and refer to yours and I'll let them in. This bug must be squashed.

- Scott

 

[largolam]

It is entirely ludicrous for them to require administrative access to *OUR* equipment in order for them to research and fix a bug in *THEIR* software.

They are stonewalling now.

I've filed the bug. We'll see how important they consider it. If you want to give them root access to your servers thats your business.