Mailman 3 May 2000 - Mailman-Developers

Re: [Mailman-Developers] Huge lists
by Nigel Metheringham 24 May '00

24 May '00

peter(a)gol.com said: > @some.dom.ain /dev/null > any number of addresses, almost instantly, postfix and sendmail have > this functionality. [and exim in different syntax] Remember that unless the sender side is using qmail or VERP then 2 million addresses all in this domain would normally optomise down to a single SMTP message transaction with 2 million RCPT TO's. You may also find that you get an unexpected speed up at the inject end since the domain name may (certainly should) be cached in the MTA and/or local dns server/cache and so if the MTA does verification/routing during SMTP receipt the first address would prime the config and all the others would shoot through very quickly. I can certainly donate a few thousand addresses from my boxes. Nigel. -- [ - Opinions expressed are personal and may not be shared by VData - ] [ Nigel Metheringham Nigel.Metheringham(a)VData.co.uk ] [ Phone: +44 1423 850000 Fax +44 1423 858866 ]

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Re: [Mailman-Developers] Huge lists
by J C Lawrence 23 May '00

23 May '00

On Wed, 24 May 2000 08:52:50 +0900 Peter Evans <peter(a)gol.com> wrote: > J C Lawrence (claw(a)cp.net) wrote: >> I'll provisionally offer, ohh, two blocks, one of 5K addresses >> and another of 1K. Setup for the addresses will be as aliases >> piping directly to /dev/null. > @some.dom.ain /dev/null > any number of addresses, almost instantly, postfix and sendmail > have this functionality. Yeah, I know. The numbers above are just wild-arse-guesses as to the resources I want to commit, both in local system and bandwidth, and relying on Barry's sense of fair play in not abusing the donation (I have other things I use both boxes and their bandwidth for that I want to keep on doing). > of course, you have to be careful to balance the bits in your mail > or /dev/null could become charged with too many 1's. If you have an older SunOS box you don't cre about try this: $ /dev/zero | /dev/null The kernel would realise that the pipe never needed to enter user space and would optimise it totally into kernel space, removing it from being a proper schedulable entry. Voila! Instant dead system. -- J C Lawrence Internet: claw(a)kanga.nu ----------(*) Internet: coder(a)kanga.nu ...Honorary Member of Clan McFud -- Teamer's Avenging Monolith...

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WWW-ISIS ALPA URGENTe
by asoisis 23 May '00

23 May '00

asoisis asoisis(a)usa.net Estimados Senores: Hemos trabajado con las licencias de bireme, para la instalacion del www isis en servidores con sistemas operativos NT, UNIX y SOLARIS, hemos tenido inconvenientes en NOVELL, ya que no ejecuta el WWWi32.exe, ademas queremos saber si el sistema se puede instalar en servidores internet con sistema operativo Windows NT 4.0 y con procesador ALPHA. En espera de una pronta respuesta. Agradecemos su amable atencion,gracias por su ayuda Cordialmente, Srta. ANGELA MENDOZA ASOISIS ____________________________________________________________________ Get free email and a permanent address at http://www.netaddress.com/?N=1 ____________________________________________________________________ Get free email and a permanent address at http://www.netaddress.com/?N=1 ____________________________________________________________________ Get free email and a permanent address at http://www.netaddress.com/?N=1

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CVS tree moved
by bwarsaw＠python.org 20 May '00

20 May '00

Hi all, The move to SourceForge is complete. Please stop using the CVS repository at cvs.python.org; it is out-of-date and will eventually be removed. For more information on the Mailman SF project, please see http://sourceforge.net/project/?group_id=103 Now I can get back to integrating fixes! I'd like to get beta3 out by the end of next week. Enjoy, -Barry

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Q: Security checking in wrappers and config file
by Michael Tokarev 20 May '00

20 May '00

Hello! I looked to mailman wrappers code, and found that it performs some strange to me fings. First of all, it is seemed to be not good idea to define uids/gids as numbers inside executable wrappers (for mail and www). I think that something caused the current approach when the code was developed, but don't know what it was... Why not use the following schema: * made one config file in well-known place (e.g. /etc/mailman.conf) and require that it writable only by root (maybe) * place all the info there (including mail gid, www gid, location of mailman "home" directory etc. (the last one will be PYTHON_PATH; also, it can be read using getpwnam) * do not rely on setgid for mailman home, but instead use real setgid calls With current layout, it is not possible to split programs and data. I want to put all executables into, say, /usr/mailman, and all data to /var/[spool/]mailman and /var/log/mailman (and mount /usr read-only). Having config file it is simple. Also, with current approach, many files will be owned by some strange users when mailman operates. For example, config.db file owned by nobody (run from www) or whatether owner when run from MTA, the same cab be with logs. This is potentially unsecure, as, e.g., any other cgi script can read _and_ write this config file as a result, not only mailman group. Yes, rewriting is not very good (not an atomic operation), but I prefer security here... And some more thoughts. Many MTAs sets environment variables when delivering to programs. For example, postfix sets LOGNAME to recipient name, DOMAIN to part of recipient address after @, FROM to envelope address and so on, and those variables are _safer_ to use (in case of postfix) than information from mail contents (with both sides -- MTA can have more info available about real person who sends this mail, based on, say, smtp AUTH commands, and, in case of postfix, those values are already parsed by intelligent mechanism and with all strange/funny/control characters removed). Is it possible candidate to enhancement to include usage of those variables? Comments? Regards, Michael P.S. I'm new to this list... :)

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Re: [Mailman-Developers] problem with view other subscriptions..
by Harald Meland 19 May '00

19 May '00

[Matt Davis] > On 19 May 2000, Harald Meland wrote: > > > Oops. At first I called the new function argument "mlist", but a > > little later I renamed it to "from_mlist". However, I forgot to make > > the same change in the function's body. The fix should be rather > > straightforward to do by hand, but here it is as a patch (against > > current CVS, not your patched version of the file). > > Got this now.. This is getting embarassing :-\, my previous patch neglected to store freshly instantiated MailList objects in the variable "l". The line to fix is 436 MailList.MailList(i, lock=lock) Change this to 436 l = MailList.MailList(i, lock=lock) and things should hopefully start working again. > BTW, i love untested stuff.. If being a genuie pig is the only way i > can help, i'm game! OK, then -- for your enjoyment only, I have neglected to test this change, too :) -- Harald

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Re: [Mailman-Developers] problem with view other subscriptions..
by Harald Meland 19 May '00

19 May '00

[Matt Davis] > Applied all patches & got this.. Oops. At first I called the new function argument "mlist", but a little later I renamed it to "from_mlist". However, I forgot to make the same change in the function's body. The fix should be rather straightforward to do by hand, but here it is as a patch (against current CVS, not your patched version of the file). Sorry that it is still untested, -- Harald

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ValueError: unpack tuple of wrong size
by Serge M. Egelman 18 May '00

18 May '00

Hi, I just noticed that on 5 of the lists that I host, when you go to "pending administrative requests" you get the following error: Traceback (innermost last): File "/home/mailman/scripts/driver", line 89, in run_main main() File "/home/mailman/Mailman/Cgi/admindb.py", line 121, in main PrintRequests(mlist, doc, form) File "/home/mailman/Mailman/Cgi/admindb.py", line 176, in PrintRequests PrintPostRequest(mlist, id, info, total, count, form) File "/home/mailman/Mailman/Cgi/admindb.py", line 192, in PrintPostRequest ptime, sender, subject, reason, filename = info ValueError: unpack tuple of wrong size Looking through the logs, it appears that the 5 lists affected all got a message from "opera9(a)flash.net" (a non-subscriber), it appears that since the messages were all received within 10 seconds of each other, this is most likely spam. These are the only lists that exhibit this problem, and I think that it's all related to this message. Any ideas? serge -- /* Serge Egelman Broadband Network Services "Never underestimate the power of human stupidity." - Lazarus Long */

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Re: [Mailman-Developers] problem with view other subscriptions..
by Harald Meland 18 May '00

18 May '00

[Matt Davis] > On Sun, 14 May 2000, Thomas Wouters wrote: > > > Does the machine it runs on, have a steady clock or do you run > > 'ntpdate' every 10 minutes because the clock is heavily skewed ? Ahem, not that it's my business, but that'd be ugly -- if you have a heavily skewed clock, you'd probably be better off using something like xntpd. > > (This happens on some of our early Pentium-II's, can be as much as > > a few minutes (!!) per hour. An hourly ntpdate fixes the symptoms, > > but I imagine it can screw Mailman bigtime :P) Very true. xntpd does not (normally) adjust the clock in big steps, but rather corrects it ever so smoothly towards the correct time. > 1. Everything runs on 1 machine. > 2. No time update utils are running at all.. Basically stock redhat 6.2 > 3. I think its a stable clock.. it is a ppro 200 mhz, 64 meg ram. But > the execution of that command shouldnt matter much if everythings on the > same machine & time & cpu? Well, the time used by "view other subscriptions" is proportional to the number of lists in your Mailman installation, as it beneath the hood really iterates over all lists. If it takes more than the lock lifetime (by default this is 120 seconds), some other process may have snatched the lock away, causing the error you see. > Plus i don't have a very loaded mailman site (4 lists tops) and get > hardly zero traffic. The lists are personal lists. And the web > interface is hardly ever used. And when I was using it.. i was the > only user. Strange. I wouldn't think iterating over as few as 4 lists should take over 2 minutes to complete... > i cleared the logs and redid executed the problem. And logs/locks > never got anything... Try again, but only after you have put LIST_LOCK_DEBUGGING = 1 in your Mailman/mm_cfg.py, as current CVS Mailman has debug lock logging turned off by default. -- Harald

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Possible bug in archiving
by Serge Egelman 18 May '00

18 May '00

Hi, I'm running 2.0Beta2 and there seems to be a bug in the archiving feature. All messages that require moderator approval are not archived. All messages that go directly to the list are archived properly. Any ideas? serge -- /* * Serge Egelman * serge(a)bnsi.net * Broadband Network Services, Inc. */

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