Subject: [trill] Trill List Outage

From: Glen <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 8 May 2012 17:56:32 -0700

Dear Trill List -

As some of you may already know, your list has been out of service for about
the last six hours or so.  Messages sent to the list would have resulted in a
delivery failure message back to the sender.  Donald Eastlake reported this
to us several hours ago, and the problem is now fixed.

It appears that, when we created a new mailing list earlier this morning,
mailman failed to rebuild one of the mail database files (the "virtual
table" file used by Postfix) necessary for proper list mail transport.  It
turns out that the server permissions on that file were wrong, although I
do not know why that would have happened, and so mailman could not recreate
the file.  

Of course, mailman did not give me an error message of any kind (I created
the list myself) so I wasn't aware of that failure, but because of it, a
pre-March version of the database was used instead, resulting in the breakage
of your list, and several lists created for IETF 84.

I've fixed the permissions, so this "should" not happen again, and I'm copying
the entire AMS IETF Team on this email so that they are all aware of this.  If
there is some larger problem with mailman, however, we may have more work to do.
We'll keep an eye on it over the next several list creates, to help ensure this
does not happen again.

I'm sorry for the inconvenience.  Please feel free to contact us at ietf-action
if any of you encounter any further problems.

Glen
Glen Barney
IT Director
AMS (IETF Secretariat)