When in doubt, restart

Posted on Feb 23, 2007 in IT | 0 comments

One of the many duties I have as an IT manager is setting up and mainting listserves. Mailman is an open-source tool (quite a good one, actually) for managing lists. Normally, it works fine and cause me no trouble (other than its functional-yet-intimidating interface).

However, Triversal recently conducted a server move and this apparently threw Mailman for a loop. For two weeks none of our lists worked: no notfications of pending messages, no deliveries, etc. Yet the web-based management pages worked great. This discovery set off days of intense troubleshooting, encompassing everything from DNS and MX records to server config files. Nothing helped.

What I overlooked, and my resourceful colleague did not, was the simple restart. I asked him for help, and a bit later my inbox was flooded with pent-up Mailman messages. “What’d you do?!” I cried (virtually, over IM of course). “Restarted Mailman,” was all he had to say. Duh. I’d violated the second cardinal rule of solving technology problems: restart it and see if the problem persists. (Rule one, of course, is checking whether its plugged in. And yes, I have a true story about rule one).

Here’s the command, either for myself in the future or search engines:

/etc/rc.d/init.d/mailman restart

Corollary: listserv or listserve?

Apparently, some geek fifteen or twenty years ago either couldn’t spell listserve or was limited by some 8.3 naming convention, thus bringing the misspelling “listserv” to life. Damn him/her/it to the third circle of language hell, the one reserved for those who create misspellings that become unkillable bastard words (squooch over a bit, creator of the word “thru,” you’ve got some new company).

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