The mailing list for listmasters using Sympa

[Miles Fidelman <address@concealed>]

On 11/10/18 9:55 AM, Soji Ikeda wrote:
> 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.

Nope.  The times this has happened to me have pretty much always been 
tied to a specific message, and they only cure has been either removing 
messages 1 by one from the queue, or just dumping entire queues.

> 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.

Yeah, I should probably do that one of these days.  Sigh...
> 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...

Now that's not very helpful, is it.  It sure would seem like a good idea 
to log checkpoints - like the start of processing a message, and it's 
message ID.

Thanks,

Miles

--
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is.  .... Yogi Berra