Min requirements for running Mailman?
Apologies in advance for this basic of a question but this is technical in nature and thus doesn't seem appropriate for the users or list owners lists.
Is there a listing somewhere for the minimum requirements or recommended config for running Mailman WRT machine, ram etc.
My specific question is if it is possible to run it on a VPS such as http://www.linode.com/ ?
If yes, this seems a more cost-effective alternative to paying for a dedicated box.
Thoughts?
AB
At 9:39 AM -0700 2004-08-30, Adam Boettiger wrote:
Is there a listing somewhere for the minimum requirements or recommended config for running Mailman WRT machine, ram etc.
Not that I know of, no. Everything depends on how many
subscribers you will have, how those subscribers are distributed (are they all on one server, or are they spread amongst multiple servers), what kind of traffic you foresee (i.e., lots of large attachments or short text-only messages), how many messages per day you anticipate, whether or not you enable VERP, etc....
For a small list, a Compaq Armada 4131T with a 133MHz Pentium-1
processor, 48MB of RAM, and a 1GB hard drive, should be sufficient.
My specific question is if it is possible to run it on a VPS such as http://www.linode.com/ ?
VPS? You mean a virtual server system such as provided by
VMWare, or Xen, or jail() under FreeBSD?
Technically, yes -- it should theoretically work. But there are
always slightly little strangeness things that could always interfere with that kind of operation.
The only way to know for sure would be to try it out and see what happens.
If yes, this seems a more cost-effective alternative to paying for a dedicated box.
It might work for you, or it might not. It's going to be
difficult to tell unless you try it out, and I would imagine it would probably be pretty much impossible for anyone else to give you any really strong guidance on this matter unless you can give us a lot more details of what you've got planned.
Adam Boettiger wrote:
Apologies in advance for this basic of a question but this is technical in nature and thus doesn't seem appropriate for the users or list owners lists.
Is there a listing somewhere for the minimum requirements or recommended config for running Mailman WRT machine, ram etc.
My specific question is if it is possible to run it on a VPS such as http://www.linode.com/ ?
Sure. I'm not sure what Mailman's minimum requirements are, but a VPS will certainly satisfy them. I have Mailman running in a VPS. Obviously, depending on your usage, you may have problems. But I'd actually suspect not -- you can use swap to keep from running out of memory, and Mailman's disk usage is reasonable (not counting archives). There's no real minimum CPU speed. And actually, Mailman will work fairly well with a modest CPU, since it queues its work -- a VPS will typically have a fair amount of CPU available to it, but at any one moment it may not (depending on what the other VPSs are doing). If you have a lot of traffic, I would only expect the lists to get slower, not for Mailman to fail in any catastrophic way. Of course, YMMV.
Ian Bicking wrote:
Sure. I'm not sure what Mailman's minimum requirements are, but a VPS will certainly satisfy them.
Of the following, is there a distribution that plays better with Mailman than any of the others? :)
CentOS 3.1 Debian 3.0r1 Fedora Core 1 Gentoo Linux 2004-06-29 Mandrake 9.1 Red Hat 8.0 Red Hat 9.0 Slackware 10 Slackware 9.0
At 7:05 PM -0700 2004-08-30, Adam Boettiger wrote:
Of the following, is there a distribution that plays better with Mailman than any of the others? :)
CentOS 3.1 Debian 3.0r1 Fedora Core 1 Gentoo Linux 2004-06-29 Mandrake 9.1 Red Hat 8.0 Red Hat 9.0 Slackware 10 Slackware 9.0
Well, if you check the archives and the FAQ, in the past Red Hat
and Red Hat derived distributions have had certain known problems with the RPMs that they have made available, but I don't know about the current RPMs. Given their past history, my view is that you might want to try to avoid them if you can.
Within python.org itself, the preferred Linux distribution so far
has been Debian, although I don't know if all machines run Linux.
Can't speak for any of the others. I don't have any personal
experience with any of them.
Myself, I prefer FreeBSD, but then I know that OS choice is a
very personal matter.
For example, within python.org, OS choice for the machines has a
lot to do with where the system is physically located and who is going to be primarily responsible for going on-site and doing things to the machine at the console, if something should seriously break, and what the personal preferences are of that person/team.
On Tue, 2004-08-31 at 10:00 +0200, Brad Knowles wrote:
At 7:05 PM -0700 2004-08-30, Adam Boettiger wrote: Well, if you check the archives and the FAQ, in the past Red Hat and Red Hat derived distributions have had certain known problems with the RPMs that they have made available, but I don't know about the current RPMs. Given their past history, my view is that you might want to try to avoid them if you can.
I'd tend to take this as:- * Mailman is a bitch to package * RH have packaged it for a while * RH found a good few of the gotchas in packaging Mailman * RH have subsequently learnt from their mistakes and recently have produced good packages. * Other distros may do better, or may yet have to learn from their mistakes :-)
Just for the record, the errata FC1 packages, and all the FC2 packages worked fine for me. However I don't run Mailman on production on FC* (due to the machine provided by Cambridge Uni for exim.org running FreeBSD).
Myself, I prefer FreeBSD, but then I know that OS choice is a very personal matter.
Heh - transferring to FreeBSD has been very much a learning experience. Best to ask me in a year what I think of it :-)
Nigel.
On Aug 31, 2004, at 5:00 AM, Nigel Metheringham wrote:
I'd tend to take this as:- * Mailman is a bitch to package * RH have packaged it for a while * RH found a good few of the gotchas in packaging Mailman * RH have subsequently learnt from their mistakes and recently have produced good packages. * Other distros may do better, or may yet have to learn from their mistakes :-)
I believe point number one there says it all. :)
Also, if you're concerned about packaging, you might want to consider doing it from source. It's really not very hard -- Mailman generally upgrades easily if you're not going between major revisions.
I've been running it from source on Red Hat, Debian and FreeBSD machines for many years now without too many gotchas. The only one that comes to mind was an oddity with the HTML to plaintext conversion on our older red hat machine, but it's a really easy fix in the config file.
Terri
- Nigel Metheringham
| I'd tend to take this as:- | * Mailman is a bitch to package
Not really. It's fairly well-behaved in my experience. It's a semi-large web application with some requirements, but nothing unreasonable.
| * RH have packaged it for a while | * RH found a good few of the gotchas in packaging Mailman | * RH have subsequently learnt from their mistakes and recently | have produced good packages. | * Other distros may do better, or may yet have to learn from their | mistakes :-)
Mailman has been in Debian since June 1998 (1.0b4), so we've been working on it for a while as well. I think our packages are of good quality (far from perfect, but making perfect packages is _a lot_ of work. ;)
. UNIX is user friendly, it's just picky about who its friends are : :' :. '-
On Tue, 2004-08-31 at 04:00, Brad Knowles wrote:
Well, if you check the archives and the FAQ, in the past Red Hat and Red Hat derived distributions have had certain known problems with the RPMs that they have made available, but I don't know about the current RPMs. Given their past history, my view is that you might want to try to avoid them if you can.
To the best of my knowledge the problems were addressed and there are many satisfied users. We did ship a package with an install problem, but then again bugs happen, its the nature of software. I'm not sure it's fair for you to maintain a mailman FAQ entry denigrating Red Hat or reiterate that view in the mailing list for a past mistake, may we apply for forgiveness?
At 10:45 AM -0400 2004-08-31, John Dennis wrote:
To the best of my knowledge the problems were addressed and there are many satisfied users. We did ship a package with an install problem, but then again bugs happen, its the nature of software. I'm not sure it's fair for you to maintain a mailman FAQ entry denigrating Red Hat or reiterate that view in the mailing list for a past mistake, may we apply for forgiveness?
Fair enough. Would you agree that it's fair to warn people about
older versions, however?
On Tue, 2004-08-31 at 14:06, Brad Knowles wrote:
At 10:45 AM -0400 2004-08-31, John Dennis wrote:
To the best of my knowledge the problems were addressed and there are many satisfied users. We did ship a package with an install problem, but then again bugs happen, its the nature of software. I'm not sure it's fair for you to maintain a mailman FAQ entry denigrating Red Hat or reiterate that view in the mailing list for a past mistake, may we apply for forgiveness?
Fair enough. Would you agree that it's fair to warn people about older versions, however?
Of course. The right thing is to communicate the issue so people know how to resolve any problems they encounter, thats the purpose and spirit of a FAQ.
At 9:39 AM -0700 2004-08-30, Adam Boettiger wrote:
Apologies in advance for this basic of a question but this is technical in nature and thus doesn't seem appropriate for the users or list owners lists.
BTW, I'd like to thank you for your good questions. This will
make excellent fodder for the FAQ, and I'm surprised that it wasn't already there.
I'll try to get these two items into the FAQ tonight, if someone
else doesn't beat me to it.
Brad Knowles wrote:
BTW, I'd like to thank you for your good questions. This will makeexcellent fodder for the FAQ, and I'm surprised that it wasn't already there.
Brad - No worries. Happy to be the guinea pig. ;)
Here's something else you may want to add as I'm sure I'm not the only one in this situation...
I was looking for something that would allow me to run Mailman and learn as I go about the install process and tweaking it. I didn't want to pay the $99 to $250 for a dedicated box (overkill for what I want to do with it).
What I found was Linode http://www.linode.com/, where they offer VPS accounts that you can configure from scratch with one or more boots of five flavors of Linux. Well documented forums. Email form support that is responsive. Root access and the ability to make all the mistakes I want to for (and this is the best part) the starting price of $19.95 per month...
It's like being able to ride a cheap bike with training wheels to learn before moving to a dedicated box (if that is even needed for small work).
In any case, a great thing to add to the FAQ I think as many I imagine are learning and it's better to learn cheaply than to have to invest a ton of money.
HTH
AB
At 7:30 AM -0700 2004-08-31, Adam Boettiger wrote:
BTW, I'd like to thank you for your good questions. This willmake excellent fodder for the FAQ, and I'm surprised that it wasn't already there.
Brad - No worries. Happy to be the guinea pig. ;)
Alright, I've spent some time writing and polishing the FAQ entry
for this, and would ask you to take a look at http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/faqw-mm.py?req=show&file=faq01.024.htp. I know this doesn't directly address the issue of the particular questions regarding the distributions available to you via Linode, but would this have helped answer your question at the time?
Teilnehmer (7)
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Adam Boettiger -
Brad Knowles -
Ian Bicking -
John Dennis -
Nigel Metheringham -
Terri Oda -
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