The mailing list for listmasters using Sympa

[Soji Ikeda <address@concealed>]

Hi Miles,

2018/10/30 3:39、Miles Fidelman <address@concealed>のメール:

> Hi Folks,
> 
> I'm having a problem - hopefully somebody might have some ideas.
> 
> Sympa 6.1.20, with postfix, amavisd, clamav.
> 
> On rare occasion, sympa.pl will die, and do so repeatedly after attempting 
> to restart all the sympa processes.
> 
> In the past, the cure has been simple - stop all the processes, empty the 
> queues (almost there's some message that is making something barf), kill 
> any wwsympa tasks running, restart apache, restart sympa.
> 
> This time, it's not working - ques are flushed, stop everything, a sympa.pl 
> process is still running (even though sympa status says it died), kill the 
> process, then restart.  Sympa.pl immediately dies again (status shows 
> "sympa died, pid file remains.".  Nothing in the log that shows anything 
> wrong.
> 
> Any suggestions as to:
> 
> - things that might cause sympa.pl to die abnormally?
> 
> - any diagnostic tricks (higher log levels, where to set them, etc?)

Frequent restarting may be due to service management by operating
system  (e.g. Solaris behaves such by default).
If you are using Linux with Systemd, check unit files bundled in source
tarball of recent version of Sympa (it may be applicable to Sympa 6.1
with a few modifications): They won’t cause uncontrollable restarting.

On logging, Sympa 6.2 logs traceback almost whenever it dies (see an
example by racke).  Sympa 6.1 was quiet when it died, and administrators
sometimes were not aware of dying and often couldn’t know why it died.

I suggest upgrading to Sympa 6.2.x is better way.

Note:

Increasing log_level in sympa.conf is not useful for administrators: Debug 
levels (log_level 1 or more) are useful for programmers.  — And bugs lurk in 
where programmers haven’t inserted log output...


Regards,
— Soji

> Thanks very much!
> 
> Miles Fidelman
> 
> -- 
> In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
> In practice, there is.  .... Yogi Berra
>