The mailing list for listmasters using Sympa

["Shweta Patil (Staff)" <address@concealed>]

Hi David,

We have similar set up  to Betty ie we do not stop Sympa or postgres for  
patching. We patch the Sympa server using Ansible every month with test 
server being patched a week before live to confirm no issues from patches.

Also, we have excluded Sympa package from automated patching so that gives us 
ability to plan for Sympa upgrade at our convenience 

Sympa and postgres are in system startup too

Thanks  

Kind Regards,
Shweta


-----Original Message-----
From: address@concealed <address@concealed> On Behalf Of 
Widerski, Betty
Sent: Thursday, June 19, 2025 1:36 PM
To: David Carter <address@concealed>
Cc: address@concealed
Subject: Re: [en@sympa] Shutting Sympa down safely

CAUTION: External Email


Fwiw we do not shut down Sympa or Postgres for patching. I schedule patching 
after the nightly Postgres backup cron runs and before our 6am cron that 
sends a test post to our privileged owners list.

Also we have a Dev Sympa server we patch a week before the Prod one so we can 
verify the web interface is functioning as well as the test post. We’ve had 
only one patching issue, that affected only the interface.

Also assuming you have Sympa & Postgres in your system startup.

Betty


> On Jun 19, 2025, at 2:55 AM, David Carter <address@concealed> wrote:
>
> We have been asked to implement automated patching of all of our systems, 
> including the system which runs Sympa on RHEL 9.  This would involve some 
> patching and a possible reboot in the middle of the night when noone is 
> around to fix problems, so the process has to be reliable.
>
> When I patch this system by hand, I would normally shut down Sympa and the 
> PostgreSQL database first. The full sequence looks something like:
>
> systemctl stop httpd
> systemctl stop exim
> systemctl stop sympa
> systemctl stop wwsympa (*)
> systemctl stop sympasoap (*)
> systemctl stop postgresql
> dnf update
>
> The complication is that the two "systemctl stop" command labelled (*) have 
> a nasty habit of hanging: when I patch this system by hand I often have to 
> ^C and rerun the "sytemctl stop" command or kill specific processes by 
> hand. Obviously we can't automate that bit.
>
> I have also tried:
>
> systemctl stop wwsympa.socket
> systemctl stop sympasoap.socket
>
> That didn't seem to help.
>
> Some experiments early this morning indicate that the problem is that 
> systemd likes to restart wwsympa and sympasoap when it is supposed to be 
> shutting them down. This might have something to do with:
>
> /usr/lib/systemd/system/wwsympa.service
> Restart=always
> RestartSec=5
>
> I guess that one approach would be to simply skip:
>
> systemctl stop wwsympa
> systemctl stop sympasoap
>
> as those services should be isolated from the world so long as Apache httpd 
> is shut down.
>
> Can I ask what other people do to shut Sympa do?
>
> Has anyone tweaked the
>
> /usr/lib/systemd/system/wwsympa.service
> /usr/lib/systemd/system/sympasoap.service
>
> files which are provided by the Sympa rpm provided by EPEL so that:
>
> systemctl stop wwsympa
> systemctl stop sympasoap
>
> work more reliably? Thanks in advance for any responses,
>
> --
> David Carter                             Email: address@concealed
> University of Cambridge,
> Information Services,
> 7 J J Thomson Avenue,
> Cambridge UK.  CB3 0RB