Mailman 3 May 1999 - Mailman-Users

Redhat 6.0's sendmail 8.9.3-10 and smrsh settings for mailman
by John Lewis 13 May '99

13 May '99

With RedHat 6.0, running sendmail 8.9.3-10, sendmail by default runs through smrsh. Mailman's INSTALL file is correct in identifying the problem, and the solution is correct. However, the smrsh directory is /etc/smrsh on RedHat 6.0, not /usr/admn/sm.bin. Hope this helps. - John Lewis ProSpace Webmaster and Mailing List Maintainer

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Admin Web pages not updating list configuration.
by Moore, Mark D 13 May '99

13 May '99

> I've just installed Mailman 1.0rc1 for the first time. > The hardware is x86 running RedHat Linux v5.2 > > When using the admin web pages for a list (any list), the page > drops me back to the 'List Administrative Password' prompt > after hitting the 'Submit Changes variable'. None of the changes > are made, either. > > For instance, if changing a user's distribution to digest form, hitting > the submit button, I'm dropped back to the 'List Administrative Password' > prompt. > > The Web server is Apache. > > FollowSymLinks is turned on. > Not error messages appear in /var/log/httpd/error_log, > /var/log/httpd/access_log, > or the /usr/local/mailman/log/error files. > > This behavior is consistent on all administrative and user web pages. > > tia. > > Mark > --0- > ------ > > Mark Moore, Systems Administrator > Ball Aerospace & Technology Corp. > 1600 Commerce Ave, CO-6 > Boulder, CO 80301-2734 > > (W) 303-939-6224 > (F) 303-939-5807 > mdmoore(a)ball.com > -------------------------------------------------------------------------- > ----------------------------------- >

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problems setting up..
by Tom Bowman 13 May '99

13 May '99

I just installed mailman on a slackware Linux box i am running.. it's currently using sendmail 8.9.3/8.9.3 .. if i send an email to the list i have setup (which appears to be setup properly) i get this error in my /var/adm/maillog: May 13 09:00:46 absolut sendmail[4667]: JAA04667: from=<tbowman(a)sequeltech.com>, size=450, class=0, pri=30450, nrcpts=1, msgid=<81DCCCD6EFCED011AB5200805FA6FBC98ADF40(a)bellprod.sequeltech.com>, proto=ESMTP, relay=[207.109.88.2] May 13 09:00:47 absolut sendmail[4668]: JAA04668: clone JAA04667, owner=posse-admin May 13 09:00:47 absolut sendmail[4668]: JAA04668: to="|/personal/mailman/mail/wrapper post posse", delay=00:00:01, xdelay=00:00:00, mailer=prog, stat=unknown mailer error 126 May 13 09:00:47 absolut sendmail[4668]: JAA04668: JAB04668: DSN: unknown mailer error 126 May 13 09:00:47 absolut sendmail[4668]: JAB04668: to="|/personal/mailman/mail/wrapper mailowner posse", delay=00:00:00, xdelay=00:00:00, mailer=prog, stat=unknown mailer error 126 May 13 09:00:47 absolut sendmail[4668]: JAB04668: to=MAILER-DAEMON, delay=00:00:00, mailer=local, stat=User unknown May 13 09:00:47 absolut sendmail[4668]: JAB04668: JAC04668: return to sender: User unknown when mail is sent to posse(a)leech.org [posse is the name of the list] .. /etc/aliases: mailman: juice(a)leech.org mailman-owner: mailman(a)leech.org posse: "|/personal/mailman/mail/wrapper post posse" posse-admin: "|/personal/mailman/mail/wrapper mailowner posse" posse-request: "|/personal/mailman/mail/wrapper mailcmd posse" owner-posse: posse-admin posse-owner: posse-admin .. any ideas would be greatly apreciated.. thank you.. tom

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RE: Desperation time
by John-David Childs 13 May '99

13 May '99

Yesterday I posted a question about why mail sent to a mailman mailing list (or listowner) was going to the bitbucket with an error message like "DSN Unknown Mailer Error 1" or "Operating System Error". I theorized at first that it was my version of python (1.5.2b2?) and the fact that I'm using *BSD. Upgrading to 1.5.2 final didn't help. I also upgraded from mailman 1.0b9 to 1.0rc1. Nope. Same problem. Next, I theorized that my renaming of mailman's wrapper to "mmwrapper" (to avoid conflicts with Majordomo's wrapper in my smrsh "sm.bin" directory) might have triggered some hardcoded names in the mailman scripts/sources. Nope, that wasn't it either. I was not getting any of the "wanted GID=XX, got GID=yy" errors from wrapper common to other installations. I finally figured out a workaround, although I'm not happy at all with it. I had to install mailman's wrapper in the smrsh directory as root (the one in the ~mailman/mail directory is owned by mailman.daemon). I'm not completely finished testing, but it looks like I have to set the SUID bit too :( This was necessary so that the wrapper program could assume what ever priviledges it thought it needed. Setting it to mailman.daemon with the SGID bit set didn't seem to work. So...do I have something else messed up in my installation? I've never seen anyone else complain that wrapper had to be root with smrsh (I'm not sure if smrsh is the issue here or what). -- John-David Childs (JC612) Enterprise Internet Solutions Systems Administration http://www.nterprise.net & Network Engineering 8707 E. Florida Ave #814 Denver, CO 80231 You could get a new lease on life -- if only you didn't need the first and last month in advance.

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wrapper problems with sendmail, help
by John Lewis 13 May '99

13 May '99

I recently had to reinstall sendmail. Now this is what I get: The original message was received at Thu, 13 May 1999 09:02:14 -0400 from localhost ----- The following addresses had permanent fatal errors ----- "|/home/mailman/mail/wrapper mailowner prospace-board" (expanded from: prospace-board-admin) ----- Transcript of session follows ----- sh: wrapper not available for sendmail programs 554 "|/home/mailman/mail/wrapper mailowner prospace-board"... Service unavailable Help. How do I go about correcting this? I'm now running sendmail 8.9.3-10. Thanks.

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admindb features
by Ricardo Kustner 13 May '99

13 May '99

Hi, Here are some Moderate features I think would be really usefull in mailman: 1. an option to resend / forward a message held for approval to a certain e-mail address. why? sometimes you don't want to accept a post on the mailinglist, but you want to be able to show it to others (fellow moderators for example) 2. filter html... s/</</g (forgive me, i'm a perl programmer :) ) why? html messages with background, plugins, javascript and other crap mess up the pending message page. Which makes me wonder if it's any kind of security leak for people to be able to write javascript that will be run on *your* site. 3. only show attachment filenames / types instead of the MIME base64... why? if somebody sends a 1mb attachment to the list, it takes quite a while to view the pending page... and small attachments just mess it up... oh and plain-text digests aren't getting any better with attachments :( 4. the TODO says : "allow the admin to edit posts in the database (put a header in the post noting that it was edited by a moderator, however!) " what would be a better alternative IMHO is to allow the admin to add a comment on top of the message to be send to the list... the adimdb page could have a "add comment" textarea with every post held for approval... accepting a post with a non-empty comment could then add it to the post before it is send out to the list... example: ======== From: wimp(a)email.com To: mailman-users(a)python.org Subject: blah blah >****COMMENT FROM MODERATOR******* > >Read the INSTALL file in the source tree! > >****END OF MODERATOR COMMENT***** Hi, how can i install mailman on my redhat linux system? Thanks. ======== i'm going to try to make these changes in my running mailman myself, but i dont have much experience with python yet so i probably won't Do It The Right Way (tm) ... but hopefully some of the features will appear in a future release of mailman. Ricardo. --

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Re: pipermail status & more
by Mitchell Marks 12 May '99

12 May '99

I'm going to disagree a bit with Bernhard Reiter's expressed preferences, but wanted to note up front that "de gustibus non disputandum" probably applies here. >Otherwise I think that mailman doesn't necessarily need to support an >archiving and searching web engine. Most people want a ready to >go solution and it would be easy to produce that using >hypermail and htdig. IMO most people would benefit from having >easy to-go instructions for setting up hypermail and htdig. If it could be packaged together, and all the uid/gid settings reconciled, I could see it. But in fact it was a recent bad experience with hypermail, while moving my organizations web site to a different host, that made me pay attention to the announcements of Mailman. Maybe I got the wrong version of hypermail, or was expecting too much from it in terms of seamlessly absorbing a copied existing archive and picking up from there. >(I guess that I am an advocate of modularisation.) >Of course a state of the art mailarchive program in python would be >nice. ;) I always *think* that I favor modularisation, but then end up admiring something that's nicely integrated, and fuming at something modular that doesn't pop together smoothly. But whether it be a well-behaved hypermail, or pipermail, or their successor from Bernhard's wish-list, I hope that Mailman continues to "know about" the archives -- that is, keep that link to the archives along with the other links on a list's page, and keep the archiving options on each list's management pages along with the other sorts of options. >Mailinglist management: > Is there an options to have other posts as coming > from the subscriber and the allowed mailing addresses > to go to the moderators for approval? > Good idea. >Option HTML page: > I don't like that I get a different Webbrowser windows, > when I press (Details) . (Okay it is easy to change, > but still I wanted to let you know, that I don't like it.) :) > I really like having that come up as a separate "help" window, leaving undisturbed the main window where I'm picking checkboxes. But then, I'm always amazed when I use browser-back to return to some form and it hasn't forgotten my choices so far; maybe I just need more faith :) --Mitch Marks Mitchell Marks (773) 702-6041 AAC-010A CUIP: Chicago Public Schools / Univ. of Chicago Internet Project http://cuip.uchicago.edu/cuip The University of Chicago -- fun and sun capital of the Midwest

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Desperation Time! :)
by John-David Childs 12 May '99

12 May '99

I've been struggling with this issue off and on for months, and it's time to beg, grovel, and plead for help. mail sent to "listname" or "listname-request" seems to go into the ether-bitbucket, often with a "DSN unknown mailer error 1" At first, I thought the problem was the lockfile issue mentioned for BSD machines using older version of python, so yesterday I installed version 1.5 final. No change. Then I thought maybe it was a mail-gid problem, but after several experiments changing the GID and noticing the result, that isn't the problem either. I am running sendmail with smrsh and procmail as the local delivery agent. I am *also* running majordomo lists on the same machine, which also uses a "wrapper" program placed in .../sm.bin, so I'm wondering now if the problem is that I renamed mailman's wrapper from "wrapper" to "mmwrapper" in the ~mailman/mail directory, the .../sm.bin/ directory, *and* in the /etc/aliases file for the mailing list. I'm new to python so a "find -exec grep" through the mailman sources turned up some references to wrapper but I'm not sure if they were variablized or hardcoded. Any help is appreciated. -- John-David Childs (JC612) Enterprise Internet Solutions Systems Administration http://www.nterprise.net & Network Engineering 8707 E. Florida Ave #814 Denver, CO 80231 Don't worry about avoiding temptation -- as you grow older, it starts avoiding you. -- The Old Farmer's Almanac

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system performance
by Ricardo Kustner 12 May '99

12 May '99

Hi, i'm running a mailman mailinglist on a Linux system... it also has mysql and apache running and since it isnt too powerfull (due to lack of finances... it has only 32mb and a P100 processor) i have to make sure the programs running dont eat to much processor time/memory... it was running fine untill i started using mailman+exim on it... the mailinglist has 646 subscribers right now and sometimes the system load on the machine grows terribly when moderated mail is being approved on the list...(this morning it took me 30 minutes to telnet to the machine and issue a shutdown) what i want to do is to have a bit more delay between sending out the messages to the subscribers (since it's moderated anyway it doesnt matter if a post takes several minutes to be send out)... how can i accomplish this with mailman? or do i have to tweak something in exim? ps: one tip, since exim does a ident lookup with every smtp connection, i changed the exim configuration not to do this for localhost connections since mailman makes a smtp connection to the localhost with *every* message it sends out: your logs grow very fast and there's a lot of unnessary system load IMHO... Thanks, Ricardo.

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Lists archives and sort by date
by Jean-Francois Malouin 11 May '99

11 May '99

Hi, I just installed mailman-1.0rc1 and it looks great even though I had quite a hard time to configure it and set the permissions to be acceptable to sendmail-8.9.2 which is very picky about group writable directories. Now my question: Is there a way to display the date in the archive of the mailing list? It is particularly annoying not to have the date displayed when sorting the posts by date. [ I'm new to python and have a very limited experience with http and html editing...so bear with me please. ] TIA jf -- "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." - Phillip K. Dick

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