Mailman 3 July 2000 - Mailman-Developers

really bizarre B4 problem.
by Chuq Von Rospach 15 Jul '00

15 Jul '00

Okay, here's a weird one. I have no idea what's happening here. I'm ready to move all my lists to mailman tomorrow. So I've spent the last couple of days building up all the lists and getting things configured. If I go to the mailman/listinfo page, it only shows one of my lists. They are all (but one) set to be advertised, and in fact if you go to the mailman/admin page, it shows them fine. Now, I have an external list directory, so this doesn't kill me, but it's going to make life interesting if I can't fix it quickly. And I don't see why it's happening. anyone else seen this at all? Has anyone checked their sites since going to B4? Are your sites working okay? sigh... It was going much too smoothly in the transition. Now I know why, I think. yippee... -- Chuq Von Rospach - Plaidworks Consulting (mailto:chuqui@plaidworks.com) Apple Mail List Gnome (mailto:chuq@apple.com) And they sit at the bar and put bread in my jar and say 'Man, what are you doing here?'"

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solved (realy weird...)
by Chuq Von Rospach 15 Jul '00

15 Jul '00

many thanks to Risto Kotalampi, who caught the problem right away -- the server I'm working on is *about* to go production, and so (except for one list, where I screwed up), the URLs point to the machine it's going to be, not the one it is. So because of that, it's not showing them. It's doing exactly what it's supposed to do -- and once I finish the migration and turn off the old machine, I'll be fine. thanks, Risto! that saves me some huge headscratching. -- Chuq Von Rospach - Plaidworks Consulting (mailto:chuqui@plaidworks.com) Apple Mail List Gnome (mailto:chuq@apple.com) And they sit at the bar and put bread in my jar and say 'Man, what are you doing here?'"

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Serious problem with password generation
by Sean Reifschneider 14 Jul '00

14 Jul '00

One of our list members just sent a complaint in about Mailman. He was going on vacation and had requested the software send him his password so he could modify his subscription. Upon getting the e-mail from mailman, he found that his password was "pudd", which he took personally. ;-) Perhaps we need something to check the passwords generated against a list of known offensive passwords? Then we could have a configuration option to give PREFERENCE to the offensive passwords. After I stopped laughing, the user was told not to take it so personally. :-) Sean -- "Having computers is a lot like having kids, except it's not as much of a problem if they die while you're away." -- Sean Reifschneider, 1997 Sean Reifschneider, Inimitably Superfluous <jafo(a)tummy.com> tummy.com - Linux Consulting since 1995. Qmail, KRUD, Firewalls, Python

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Lock file problems in 2.0b2...
by Lance A. Brown 14 Jul '00

14 Jul '00

Greetings, We had our mailman spit up a bunch of these traces the other night. All of these appear to be related to a single message sent to one of our largest lists at a time when the mailman server was under load from doing backups. Trolling in the archives seems to indicate this is a lock timeout issue. Will upgrading to the soon-to-be-released production 2.0 fix this? Thanks, --[Lance] ----- The following addresses had permanent fatal errors ----- "|/usr/local/mailman/mail/wrapper mailowner sf-brief" (expanded from: <sf-brief-admin(a)bobo.niehs.nih.gov>) ----- Transcript of session follows ----- Traceback (innermost last): File "/usr/local/mailman/scripts/mailowner", line 71, in ? main() File "/usr/local/mailman/scripts/mailowner", line 48, in main mlist = MailList.MailList(sys.argv[1]) File "/usr/local/mailman/Mailman/MailList.py", line 69, in __init__ self.Load() File "/usr/local/mailman/Mailman/MailList.py", line 858, in Load self.Lock() File "/usr/local/mailman/Mailman/MailList.py", line 1300, in Lock self.__lock.lock() File "/usr/local/mailman/Mailman/LockFile.py", line 228, in lock self.__kickstart(force=1) File "/usr/local/mailman/Mailman/LockFile.py", line 138, in __kickstart os.unlink(self.__lockfile) OSError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: '/usr/local/mailman /locks/sf-brief.lock' 554 "|/usr/local/mailman/mail/wrapper mailowner sf-brief"... unknown mailer error 1

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Re: [Mailman-Developers] Multiple subscription requests
by Hrvoje Niksic 14 Jul '00

14 Jul '00

Chuq Von Rospach <chuqui(a)plaidworks.com> writes: > At 2:04 PM +0200 7/14/00, Hrvoje Niksic wrote: > >If the same person tries to subscribe to a list more than once, the ^ > >administrator gets all the requests on the "administrative requests" > >page. I believe the list of subscribers-to-be should be uniquified, > >i.e. you should see only one subscription request from one person. > > What about the case where different lists have different > administrators? I was talking about one person sending multiple subscription requests to *one* list. > You can't assume that different lists are under the same > administration, or that the subscription apporvals are the same. I haven't made such an assumption.

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Multiple subscription requests
by Hrvoje Niksic 14 Jul '00

14 Jul '00

If the same person tries to subscribe to a list more than once, the administrator gets all the requests on the "administrative requests" page. I believe the list of subscribers-to-be should be uniquified, i.e. you should see only one subscription request from one person. On the same note, there is no way to just ignore ("discard") a subscription request -- if someone sends four subscription requests, you can approve of one, but you have to "refuse" the others, while you really want to "discard" them. Could the uniquification and "discard" feature be added to a future version?

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Subscribing to several lists from one page
by Benjamin B. Thomas 13 Jul '00

13 Jul '00

Hi there! I've been following Mailman for awhile, and now am about ready to make heavy use of it. However, I do need to make some changes, and I would like to ask for some advice as to the best way to get started and how I might do this in a way that might be beneficial enough to others to be accepted back into the distribution. Basically, I would like to have a page like the current listinfo page which gives the user the ability to subscribe to multiple lists simultaneously (or have an option to turn this on in the listinfo page). For the usage patterns I am expecting, it will be burdensome to have the user visit each individual list's page, subscribe to each list, and then confirm each subscription separately. I would like to construct an interface similar to the listinfo page where each list has a "subscribe" check-box along with the email address and password text boxes at the bottom of the page. The user would check each list they are interested in, enter his address and password in one convenient location, hit submit, and only have to reply to one combined confirmation message. So, my questions are these: 1) Can this be done in such a way that it would be desirable to fold it back into the main distribution? I think this would be useful to a number of people under different circumstances, and I would be willing to generalize it to serve broader needs. 2) How straightforward would this be? Right now, I am thinking that the major stumbling block will be integrating all the confirmations into one email and dealing with that appropriately. Are there some architectural points which would make this nasty, or should it be fairly easy to pull off? Cheers, benjy

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Subject prefix bug
by J C Lawrence 13 Jul '00

13 Jul '00

I've been running into this fairly heavily. Outlook has a tendency to MIME wrap subject headers uselessly. Thus a header such as: Re: [MUD-Dev] Fantasy clichés (was: Acting casual about casual gamers) Becomes later: [MUD-Dev] =?iso-8859-1?Q?RE:_=5BMUD-Dev=5D_Fantasy_clich=E9s?= Which shows two things: 1) Mailman didn't decode the MIME header wrapping and detect the subject prefix that was already there. 2) Outlook (the offending MUA in this case (no suprises there)) needs to be taken out back and gut shot. We can fix the first thing. I have no faith in the second thing ever being fixed. -- J C Lawrence Home: claw(a)kanga.nu ---------(*) Other: coder(a)kanga.nu http://www.kanga/nu/~claw/ Keys etc: finger claw(a)kanga.nu --=| A man is as sane as he is dangerous to his environment |=--

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even more on "error decoding.."
by Chuq Von Rospach 13 Jul '00

13 Jul '00

I went snooping. the mailman admin stuff is setting one cookie per list. AFAIKT, the cookies are correct -- in fact, I just proved it by deleting all but one cookie, and the error went away. But mailman, if multiple cookies are set, isn't decoding things properly. The bug is in "SecurityManager.py", and probably in the function CheckCookie in that file, but I'm not good enough at Python to decode it completely off the top of my head. But clearly, multiple cookies confuses the code, and it seems to be here. Barry, is the code assuming it's only going to get one cookie back at a time? (I know about that one, I did it myself, and it's a pain to find...) -- Chuq Von Rospach - Plaidworks Consulting (mailto:chuqui@plaidworks.com) Apple Mail List Gnome (mailto:chuq@apple.com) And they sit at the bar and put bread in my jar and say 'Man, what are you doing here?'"

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wrong default configuration..
by Chuq Von Rospach 13 Jul '00

13 Jul '00

By default, mailman sets new lists so that: Restrict posting privilege to list members? (member_posting_only) is no. this is a Bad Thing. A Very Bad Thing. By default, lists ought to be restricted to member posting only, because otherwise, naive users who believe the defaults are simply setting up lists that are waiting to become spamholes for their users. Allow a user to turn this off if they want, but don't depend on them knowing enough to turn it on. By default, it ought to be on, so this default should be changed for 2.0 final... -- Chuq Von Rospach - Plaidworks Consulting (mailto:chuqui@plaidworks.com) Apple Mail List Gnome (mailto:chuq@apple.com) And they sit at the bar and put bread in my jar and say 'Man, what are you doing here?'"

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