Hi,
I'm having severe operational issues with my mailman3 site. My site is built on standard Ubuntu packages (18.04), and they're ancient. I'm having two big issues...
- I have the old smiley problem that I've had from the very beginning and never solved. I have added 'charset': 'utf8mb4' to the relevant config file (/etc/mailman3/mailman-web.py), but that hasn't "taken", in the sense that the calls to mysql do not include the charset stuff.
/usr/share/mailman3-web/settings_local.py links to /etc/mailman3/mailman-web.py and there is no file /usr/share/mailman3-web/settings_local.pyc. I moved it out of the way hoping it'd get re-built, but it has not been in the months since.
The result of this that I get hundreds of mail messages to root (thousands, really), rapidly filling / with mail in /var/mail/root and logging in /var/log/mail.log. The mail has something like "Subject: [Django] ERROR (EXTERNAL IP): Internal Server Error: /mailman3/hyperkitty/api/mailman/archive" and "DataError at /hyperkitty/api/mailman/archive (1366, u"Incorrect string value: '\\xF0\\x9F\\x98\\x8A\\x0D\\x0A...' for column 'content' at row 1")"
I have tried to trace to figure out what file is _actually_ controlling the calls to mysql. There's a file called /var/lib/ucf/cache/:etc:mailman3:mailman-web.py as well, but I have no idea what that is or if it might be used.
Is there something like 'mailman info' for mailman-web so I can see what files are being used? I'd love to fix this...
- There's this one curious cron job...
- www-data [ -f /usr/bin/django-admin ] && python2.7 /usr/bin/django-admin runjobs minutely --pythonpath /usr/share/mailman3-web --settings settings
(yes, I know python2.7 is a problem... see the last paragraph below).
These jobs start piling up. They run & run & run, and eventually the machine screeches to halt when it runs out of memory and goes belly up. This is a relatively recent development. After a while, I'll have 5 or 6 or more of these all running, looking something like this:
www-data 6366 6364 99 15:00 ? 00:12:27 python2.7 /usr/bin/django-admin runjobs minutely --pythonpath /usr/share/mailman3-web --settings settings
What this means in practice right now is that I'm forced to go in and kill these on a regular basis or the machine _will_ die and people _will_ shout at me.
Does anyone have any idea why these might not be finishing? Can I comment this out completely & live happier? Any help whatsoever?
Finally, I should add that I know my current installation is fundamentally flawed because I chose to go with distro packages. I simply cannot fix it. My strong recommendation to others who follow me is that they do NOT do this. Bite the bullet and install via pip... I'm now in the process of setting up a new server that is completely based on the latest via pip installation. I have to get away from what I have or lose my sanity.
Cheers,
David