GEEEEEEEEEEZE!

Ok I'm extremely irked. Friday afternoon the classiccmp server decided it didn't have a slave drive. It has done this once or twice before, for some reason the system can't see the drive anymore so it flags it as non-existent. Usually after a reboot it goes fine for a few months at least. Most odd. I'm guessing it's the crappy Western Digital 160gb drive I bought. Don't think I'll be getting any more Western Digital for a while. It came back up friday afternoon and I saw a few emails go through the list so I assumed all was well again. Stupid Me. So I promptly decided to ignore the list for the weekend, had a very full weekend with lots of other stuff (work & home) to do. Sunday night I noticed that the list hadn't passed any traffic since friday night. First thing I checked was the drive, but that was ok. It was a very bizzare odd problem. Sendmail appeared to be working fine but mailman wasn't queueing any messages. Both inbound and outbound mail were definitely working though. Odd - the pid files for mailman were dated in the future, but the system date was correct (and had been). I tried pretty much every trick I could think of to no avail. I finally gave up around 1am and said the heck with it, I needed sleep and have some WorkStuff to take care of. Tonight will probably be an all nighter due to a different work-related server issue. I had even tried re-installing mailman 212, figuring a binary got corrupted in the fiasco friday afternoon. No Joy. Looks like all messages were sent to the shunt directory, which means a mailman executable failed. Some message about can't unicode because bytes 0-4 are not cardinal. Ick. So this morning I upgraded to mailman 2.1.4. That seems to have done the trick. Pid files are still dated in the future though. What fun. All appears to be back up and running. I apologize for the extended outtage. You'll forgive me if I ignore this list for a few days, I just don't want to think about the server for a bit. It's self-interest, I figure if I stay away from it for a few days I won't be so ready to unplug it and chuck it out the 2nd story datacenter window. Regards, Jay West --- [This E-mail scanned for viruses by Declude Virus]