I am setting up my first list server on FreeBSD. I used the ports/packages to install Mailman. Anyway, following the setup directions on the Mailman website has raised a couple of questions.

The first question is in regards to the warning in the Mailman online documentation to not be root while running ./configure. Since I didn't have to run configure, and since I was root when I installed the Mailman pkg, I was concerned that I might need change the owners from root to mailman. The group is already set to mailman. But, the owner is root for all of the files (recursively) in /usr/local/mailman/*. So, should I chown -R mailman /usr/local/mailman?

The second question that I ran into was while checking permissions. As root, the permissions checked OK. But, I wanted to run the permissions as mailman. So, I tried to su to mailman. But, su'ing to mailman returns the message, "This account is currently not available". Now that I have gone back and re-read the directions again, I see that they tell you to "become the user that did the installation (and that owns all the files in $prefix), or root". So, going to user mailman wouldn't have worked anyway. But, here again, it seems like root and the "user that did the installation" should not be the same. My question here is, why can't I su to mailman? I thought it might be because no password was set for mailman. So, I gave it one. Was that a mistake?

The ability to su to mailman looks like it is going to be a problem when I get to the crontab step.

Thanks in advance, Darren