Quoting Michael Paoli (Michael.Paoli@cal.berkeley.edu):
Hmmm, just noticed, getting some errors on the dreamhost hosted list archives, e.g. this works: http://lists.balug.org/pipermail/balug-announce-balug.org/2009-March/date.ht... but following liks from there, e.g.: http://lists.balug.org/pipermail/balug-announce-balug.org/2009-March/000125.... doesn't work
Specifically, one gets both 403 (forbidden), and 404 (not found). If you're able to go in at shell level, have a look at permissions and ownership of files in $MAILMANHOME/archives/public/balug-announce-balug.org/2009-March/ .
Here, from my own Debian-based Mailman server, is the contents of one such directory:
drwxrwsr-x 2 root list 1024 2005-05-23 20:33 . drwxrwsr-x 5 root list 1024 2005-05-24 03:27 .. -rw-rw-r-- 1 root list 3562 2005-05-23 20:33 000011.html -rw-rw-r-- 1 root list 1681 2005-05-23 20:33 author.html -rw-rw-r-- 1 root list 1685 2005-05-23 20:33 date.html lrwxrwxrwx 1 root list 11 2005-05-23 20:33 index.html -> thread.html -rw-rw-r-- 1 root list 1679 2005-05-23 20:33 subject.html -rw-rw-r-- 1 root list 1748 2005-05-23 20:33 thread.html
If you don't have access from the shell, then I guess you'll need to open a ticket with Dreamhost staff.
Obviously, I cannot guarantee the exact $MAILMANHOME/archives/public/balug-announce-balug.org/2009-March/ pathspec applies: A hosting company might do weird things to where Mailman's pipermail puts things. But I assume you can figure out where the balug-announce-balug.org mailing list's files are.
Seems to mostly (or entirely) be just some of the newer archived stuff (or stuff that *should* be archived).
Well, the $MAILMANHOME/bin/arch utility, which is the engine for pipermail, probably screws up permissions/ownership on occasion. I've never seen it do so in its automated operations. I _have_ seen it do so when I wield bin/arch manually to rebuild a list's HTML archive: You successfully rebuild the list, but then get 403 Forbidden errors. You go into the archive/public/[listname] tree and look, and lo! It created files with the wrong group ownership, or something like that. chown/chgrp them to match other nearby trees, and everything works again.
As a less likely candidate explanation (speculation only), I guess filesystem damage could also cause such symptoms.
By the way, when I say $MAILMANHOME, I don't literally mean the homedir shown in /etc/passwd for a user. I mean the main Mailman basedir. On Debian, that's /var/lib/mailman. "$MAILMANHOME" is a term I picked up from some of the documentation, somewhere (and I might have mutated it, for all I know).