COMPLETELY Virtual mailing lists....
Has anyone been able to completely virtualize the mailing lists under mailman v2?
I'm not talking about the improvements made in v2.... I mean having multiple domains be able to have the SAME list name. Unless I've missed something, right now they're limited to being unique per machine. I know I can do this now with foo_LISTA and bar_LISTA - but thats just cludgy when the users want LISTA as the name...
My gut instinct is to have all the file access routines store their info under a directory named after the virtual host. I'm not sure how simply this could be done as I've not looked tooo deeply into the guts of it, but if the file references are all dealt with via common routines, it couldnt be that hard could it?
so in ($prefix)/mailman/lists there would be
foo.com/somelistname
foo.com/LISTA
bar.com/someotherlistname
bar.com/LISTAObviously, the mail receiver post script would need to look at who the mail was addressed to in order to be able to deal with the appropriate list.... probably some extra things in the webpage generation as well.
Is this a pipe dream??
Scott Brown wrote:
Has anyone been able to completely virtualize the mailing lists under mailman v2?
Depends on how 'virtual' your setup is, and I suspect, it also depends onthe MTA.
I have three domains sitting on one machine and mailman installed for eachone (meaning, three copies of mailman). Each vhost has it's own web address, and crontask. And I can have the same list name under all three vhosts and it works.
lists.yeehaw.net -> test-list@...
lists.diarist.net -> test-list@... (these don't actually exist)
lists.pcraft.net -> test-list@...
I run sendmail as my MTA, and using its virtusertable feature, combined withaliases, each list knows where to go, what to do and what domain to use.
I have lists that exist on two, or all three domains, same name. And I havelists that only exists on one of those domains. It works like a charm....for ME! Doesn't mean it'll do the same for you.
AMK4-- W | | I haven't lost my mind; it's backed up on tape somewhere. |____________________________________________________________________
Ashley M. Kirchner <mailto:ashley@pcraft.com> . 303.442.6410 x130
SysAdmin / Websmith . 800.441.3873 x130
Photo Craft Laboratories, Inc. . eFax 248.671.0909
http://www.pcraft.com . 3550 Arapahoe Ave #6
.................. . . . . Boulder, CO 80303, USA
"AMK" == Ashley M Kirchner <ashley@pcraft.com> writes:
AMK> I have three domains sitting on one machine and mailman
AMK> installed for each one (meaning, three copies of mailman).
AMK> Each vhost has it's own web address, and crontask. And I can
AMK> have the same list name under all three vhosts and it works.That's the commonly accepted practice for "full-virtual" operation. I don't plan on improving this situation until I get a Real Database under Mailman.
-Barry
"AMK" == Ashley M Kirchner <ashley@pcraft.com> writes:
AMK> I have three domains sitting on one machine and mailman AMK> installed for each one (meaning, three copies of mailman). AMK> Each vhost has it's own web address, and crontask. And I can AMK> have the same list name under all three vhosts and it works.That's the commonly accepted practice for "full-virtual" operation. I don't plan on improving this situation until I get a Real Database under Mailman.
Isnt that kinda wasteful of system resources? (I'm from a mainframe background back in the days where 1meg of memory was a huge untapped resource)
I mean - three copies of sendmail - each consuming 'x' bytes of main memory
- swapped isnt very much - but if I've got 200+ domains on a server (I dont - but I hope to one day ;-) then thats 200x the minimum memory footprint that I want to give up to a routine that *could* be instantiated just once.
Anyways - if that's "full-virtual" - then how about a "little-bit-better-virtualization-than-currently-exists-without-breaking-the -system-and-without-going-bald-virtualization" ;-)
Does the potential of what I mentioned - having the main data repositories for a list all prefixed inside of mailman by "foo.com/" exist??? Is the underlaying structure of mailman laid out to minimize these changes if I went ahead and started to patch them myself?
Or am I dreaming of a utopia that can not exist?
At 07:21 PM 2/20/01 -0500, Scott Brown wrote:
Isnt that kinda wasteful of system resources? (I'm from a mainframe background back in the days where 1meg of memory was a huge untapped resource)
I mean - three copies of sendmail - each consuming 'x' bytes of main memory
- swapped isnt very much - but if I've got 200+ domains on a server (I dont - but I hope to one day ;-) then thats 200x the minimum memory footprint that I want to give up to a routine that *could* be instantiated just once.
You did mean "mailman" where you put "sendmail" up there, right? Because sendmail certainly has all the virtual hosting built in already, no need to have multiple daemons running. (In fact, I'm not sure how you would; you need some kind of master that figured out what port the "other" sendmail was on...)
Remember that much of the system will end up in shared memory anyway. It's not as bad as it sounds. None of this stuff stays resident anyway (well, not until the 2.1 qrunner...)
Depends on how 'virtual' your setup is, and I suspect, it also depends on the MTA.
A single instance of sendmail (8.5.5) deals with all my virtual domains... and hands off to the lists as defined by /etc/aliases (after the incoming mail has been mashed into the resulting list name)
I have three domains sitting on one machine and mailman installed for each one (meaning, three copies of mailman).
For a small number of hosts, I could deal with that... but I intend to increase my number of virts.
Each vhost has it's own web address, and crontask. And I can have the same list name under all three vhosts and it works.
Eeek... I wasnt hoping to go that far... I was thinking more like one central mailman process (like exists now) with the unique data stores segmented by virtual host.
I run sendmail as my MTA, and using its virtusertable feature, combined with aliases, each list knows where to go, what to do and what domain to use.
What I've got right now is a pseudo virtusertable setup (it's a leased server - setup like the servers that the company I'm leasing from sets up their own...) that hands off to /etc/aliases
so inbound mail to listname@virtualhost1.com
--> listname (in /etc/aliases)
--> | ../post listnameBut of course, since listname in /etc/aliases is unique to the box, I'm unable to assign that to another domain that may want that name as well.
Thats why I originally was prefixing the list name with the domain... but thats ugly when you get
thislongdomainname.com_help@thislongdomainname.comOR am I just missing the boat somewhere??
participants (4)
-
Ashley M. Kirchner -
barry＠digicool.com -
Ron Jarrell -
Scott Brown