It is clear from the mail that shows up on the users list that I am not
the only MJ user who sometimes finds that one or more lists have been
eradicated. This is one of the biggest weaknesses in MJ so far as I am
concerned, and although I have a backup plan that has (once again)
enabled me to salvage my lists, I think that this should be addressed by
the developers. A full fix may not be feasible, but certainly the
situation can easily be ameliorated.
First of all, the documentation should clearly warn of this problem, and
should describe good backup procedures. I do a regular backup now, and
can ususally restore a list from the last backup and the Log file,
although it can take a bit of time and I wuld hate to have to do this on
a very active list. Perhaps some perl utilities would help, ones that
would process the Log to pull out the changes since the last backup.
Second, while I don't know the actual procedure that MJ follows in
processing requests, it seems to me that the following could be added
quite easily, and perhaps refined; when a list is processed, count the
number of lines in the request. Make a backup copy of every list before
it is modified, and don't erase the backup if the number of entries in
the new list is less than the original number minus the number of lines
in the message being processed. This isn't perfect, but certainly when a
two line message changes the length of a list from hundreds of
subscribers to just zero or one, something must be wrong!
--
BIOME SysOp, Habitat Ecology Section, Bedford Institute of Oceanography
P. O. Box 1006, Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, CANADA B2Y 4A2. Tel. (902)426-1577
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