Although I have a few years of experience as a list administrator of lists hosted on other sites, so far I never managed a mailman server on my own. In our institute we manage small list via /etc/aliases :include:s
Recently I decided to make an experiment, so I installed mailman 2.1.11 via the suse 11.3 distribution on my machine. I read carefully the PDF "GNU Mailman Installation Manual release 2.1" by Barry Warsaw, and other stuff on the wiki, including those concerning sendmail (we are a sendmail site).
I say "experiment" since I am testing it on my personal machine, although the target system will be one of the institute servers (in process of being upgraded). I thought to gain experience first in a simpler arrangement.
I followed the manual except that at step 6 (6.3) I followed http://wiki.list.org/display/DOC/Integrating+Mailman+with+Sendmail+-+Method+... and related links.
The suse installation via yast2 installs mailman partly in /usr/lib/mailman, partly in /var/lib/mailman/ (and also /usr/share/man/man8 and /usr/share/doc/packages/mailman/), it also creates the user and group.
It does not provide any automatic configuration for apache, so I did it manually (I actually like this better). I had to place in default-server.conf also this block
<Directory "/usr/lib/mailman/cgi-bin"> AllowOverride None Options +ExecCGI -Includes Order allow,deny Allow from all </Directory>
in order to be able to execute the CGIs.
I note that the startup script /etc/init.d/mailman gives a message "Starting mailman (Warning: the Apache2 webinterface for Mailman has not been activated!)" which seems to imply a flag missing in line APACHE_SERVER_FLAGS in /etc/sysconfig/apache2, but I have no documentation for it, and it seems that the site can be accessed ok
(QUESTION 1) Any Suse user can confirm this is unnecessary ?
Concerning sendmail, I followed the "method 2" (WITHOUT mm_handler) because it seems to apply better to our institute arrangements. So I have a sudo wrapper script with the two lines
/bin/cp /var/lib/mailman/data/aliases /etc/mail/mailman.aliases
/usr/bin/newaliasesa sendmail.cf with O AliasFile=/etc/mail/aliases,/etc/mail/mailman.aliases
and the fake arrangement in mm_cfg.py
MTA='Postfix'
POSTFIX_ALIAS_CMD = '/usr/bin/sudo /usr/sbin/mailman.aliases'
POSTFIX_STYLE_VIRTUAL_DOMAINS = []I have verified the command /usr/lib/mailman/bin/genaliases works and touches the right files.
I have also run "/usr/lib/mailman/bin/newlist mailman" to create the top list and it works (it said to have sent a mail, but actually it was just queued, and it was sent as soon as I started the qrunner from /etc/init.d
I set my own e-mail as list owner, and set a password (incidentally the same test password used by /usr/lib/mailman/bin/mmsitepass)
(QUESTION 2) I hope the fact I always use the same test password is not a problem
At this point I entered the admin web page of such a list (for which I received the "Your new mailing list" message). It seems I can browse it OK.
Then I wanted to subscribe myself to the list.
If I do it via the Membership Management -> Mass Subscription, and I enter my e-mail address in the form, I get no errors but nothing happens.
If I try to subscribe via the mailman/listinfo/mailman page, I get instead an error "you must supply a valid e-mail address"
(QUESTION 3) Why does that happen ? see also question 4
I tried also to create a new mailing list via the web interface (this requires supplying the site password as well)
this gives me instead an error "Unknown virtual host: sax.iasf-milano.inaf.it "
(QUESTION 4)
This may have to do with our institute standard arrangement, and will apply also to the real arrangement on our target server. Unfortunately I cannot find the documentation for the keywords in mm_cfg.py so I am not sure what shall be tuned.
This is the content of mm_cfg.py. The first 9-10 lines were added automatically by the suse yast installation, the rest was edited/added by me to suite our apache config and the "sendmail method 2"
DEFAULT_URL_PATTERN = 'http://%s/mailman/' DEFAULT_NNTP_HOST = 'poseidon.lambrate.inaf.it' DEFAULT_EMAIL_HOST = 'poseidon.lambrate.inaf.it' DEFAULT_URL_HOST = 'poseidon.lambrate.inaf.it' MTA = 'Postfix' DELIVERY_MODULE = 'SMTPDirect' SMTPHOST = 'localhost' SMTPPORT = '25' add_virtualhost(DEFAULT_URL_HOST, DEFAULT_EMAIL_HOST) #IMAGE_LOGOS = '/mailmanicons/' IMAGE_LOGOS = '/icons/' # changed lines above manually # inserted this stuff for sendmail POSTFIX_ALIAS_CMD = '/usr/bin/sudo /usr/sbin/mailman.aliases'
I have to explain our configuration:
we have two domains. lambrate.inaf.it is the one where all A and PTR records are, and also a number of CNAMEs for various services.
iasf-milano.inaf.it is a more formal domain alias, which contains just CNAMEs for the main services visible from outside
poseidon(.lambrate.inaf.it) is my machine FQDN
sax.iasf-milano.inaf.it is the CNAME for the web server on it. It is also the ServerName in default-server.conf (so one can get to the server as sax or poseidon or localhost but is shown just that)
This will apply not only to my test configuration, but also to the target configuration (the institute web server will be www.iasf-milano.inaf.it, which is a CNAME for a server [let us say server3] ... actually that server runs different virtual servers)
all our e-mail address are FULLY MASQUERADED, i.e. they are of the form "user@lambrate.inaf.it" or "user@iasf-milano.inaf.it" (our MXs accept both in entrance, and each user selects which form to use on exit).
The message from mailman when I created the initial list did have From: mailman-owner@lambrate.inaf.it (obviously masqueraded by sendmail)
It did contain URLs like http://poseidon.lambrate.inaf.it (reachable but translated as sax.iasf-milano.inaf.it)
It did contain e-mail like mailman-request@poseidon.lambrate.inaf.it (so far I haven't tested them)
I am not sure how much of the above applies to QUESTION 4 (i.e. to run on my local machine)
(QUESTION 5) The arrangement on the target system will be more complicated.
As I said the www server is "server3", but the MX servers are instead "server1" and "server2". They are also NIS master and slave server, and all our e-mail aliases are NIS aliases (so
I am not expecting a solution to question 5 now, I guess that if I can have a running solution on my local machine, and an understanding of the inner working of mailman, some creative user of crontab scripts or NFS mounts could make the mailman aliases available to all NIS clients and visible to the outside world.
But any hint will be gratefully acknowledged.