[Mailman-Users] thanks; Debian sid upgrade notes; archive question

[Jonathan Ah Kit]

Hi

Looks like I had a bit too much dumb luck (hrm) on my side. It seems to
have worked. My gotchas with the current Debian sid and sarge (2.1.2-6)
package... I figure some of them are a bit obvious, but this is in case
some one ends up with the same problems as I did on the last attempt.

Thanks for a lovely program, overall! At the moment, I'm using it at
<http://greta.electric.gen.nz/> to run a changes list for the Doctor Fun
website <http://www.ibiblio.org/Dave/>, and David Goldstein's domain and
Internet news list. Anyways, on to what I did...

First, I used a downloaded the .deb manually to take a look at the docs.
It helped greatly to view this pre-apt-get.

1. Stopping apache and exim probably a good idea. Not essential, of
course. But stops any delays in delivery, if there aren't any errors.

2. Pre-edit /etc/exim/exim.conf. Just in case, to save on down time. It
takes a moment of diddling, that's all. Details in
/usr/share/doc/mailman/README.Exim.gz in the .deb. Find out first what
your USER and GROUP are for Mailman, though. I used the defaults from my
2.0.13 install, which was list and list. So, the variation would be:
> MAILMAN_USER=list
> MAILMAN_GROUP=list
If there's any errors, Exim just won't restart. :)

3. Make a tarball of your mailman stuff in /etc/mailman/ and
/var/lib/mailman/. That's the big bit where I mucked up last time... At
least I had the mboxes to reconstruct the mailing lists of value,
though...

4. apt-get -u install mailman

5. cp exim.conf.mm212 exim.conf -- I had trouble here, see step 2.

6. Run newlist as instructed by apt-get to create the list 'mailman'.

7. /usr/lib/mailman/bin/genaliases > newaliases and then cp /etc/aliases
/etc/aliases.mm212

8. Comment out the old aliases in /etc/aliases (or kill them)

9. cat newaliases >> /etc/aliases

10. Fire up exim and apache again.

11. Test message time.

At this point, I was pleasantly surprised for me things were going fine,
apart from the little exim mishap with the user and group variables, so
the first test message took a while to get posted. But the main thing now
was that my production lists would continue posting.

12. Fire up a web browser and check the interface.

The first thing I noticed was the cgi location changed. Nothing worked at
first.
> ScriptAlias /mailman/ /usr/lib/cgi-bin/mailman/

For me, I found that the prefixes syntax in /etc/mailman/mm_cfg.py had
changed, as some links on some pages weren't either going to the right
path or hostname. Though it took me a while to find the settings. For me,
my web server is greta.electric.gen.nz and the mailing lists are
@lists.electric.gen.nz, so...
> # 2.0.13 stuff, now ignored, it seems
> DEFAULT_HOST_NAME = 'lists.electric.gen.nz'
> DEFAULT_URL       = 'http://greta.electric.gen.nz/mailman/'
> # not ignored, it seems, but I'll get back to this in a moment
> IMAGE_LOGOS       = '/mailman/images/'
>
> # 2.1.2-6 stuff
> DEFAULT_EMAIL_HOST = 'lists.electric.gen.nz'
> DEFAULT_URL_HOST = 'greta.electric.gen.nz'
> DEFAULT_URL_PATTERN = 'http://%s/mailman/'

Some /etc/apache/httpd.conf changes... the images were broken.
> Alias /mailman/images/ /usr/share/images/mailman/

13. apachectl graceful -- then check again, until it works. Optionally,
send more test messages.

Well, I think that's it solely off the top of my head. The things that
don't work yet are the archives, but FWIW personally, I use two or so
external archivers, plus the HTML and mbox files are still being generated
(they just aren't being served, and getting 403 Forbiddens instead). Any
help here would be appreciated!

I'm really sorry if this turns out to be a bit of an arrogant document,
but I thought for once I'd better break my habit of not documenting in
detail what I did in case I have to (or someone else does) go through this
again.

Thanks again!

Regards,
Jonathan Ah Kit.

-- 
Jonathan Ah Kit - Lower Hutt - New Zealand
jonathan at ah-kit.dropbear.id.au - http://www.ah-kit.dropbear.id.au/
ahkitj at paradise.net.nz - ICQ#9747234 - http://www.electric.gen.nz/
Away message: Looking for adhesive tape, not Alibrandi.