Well, this has been running for awhile but I never bothered with the log files until now. I just run a couple of small lists for our cub scout pack. I don't even know if anyone uses digests. It works fine for all the people, to the best of my knowledge. But I'd like to get this error message from popping up everyday.

There is no bin directory under /home/mailman.

permissions on /home/mailman/lists/mailman/config.pck are:

-rw-rw---- 1 mailman mailman

Does that give any clues?

Thanks, David

Mark Sapiro wrote:

The cron job senddigests does not have permission to access the 'mailman' (site list) configuration.

If this in a new installation, run 'bin/check_perms -f' as root (in the /home/mailman/ directory) to fix permissions and/or make sure the crontab is being run as the mailman user.

If this is an existing, working installation, check the permissions/owner/group on /home/mailman/lists/mailman/config.pck

-- Mark Sapiro msapiro@value.net The highway is for gamblers, San Francisco Bay Area, California better use your sense - B. Dylan

Mark Sapiro wrote:

Maybe it's in /var/mailman. It could be anywhere depending on how Mailman was installed. Try running

find / -name mailman

as root to locate the directory where the installed mailman software is.

I found the bin directory in /usr/lib/mailman:

root@m5 /usr/lib/mailman/bin# ./check_perms -f No problems found

I remember doing this when I finished the installation as well.

...

permissions on /home/mailman/lists/mailman/config.pck are:

-rw-rw---- 1 mailman mailman

Does that give any clues?

Does the mailman crontab that runs the Mailman cron jobs run them as user 'mailman'?

Ah, ha. This looks like the problem. I've found the cron entries under /var/spool/fcron:

root@m5 /var/spool/fcron# ls -l total 16 -rw------- 1 root root 691 Jun 5 05:49 m5guru -rw-r----- 1 fcron fcron 1251 Oct 22 2004 m5guru.orig -rw------- 1 root root 507 Jun 5 05:49 root -rw------- 1 root fcron 420 Mar 23 2004 root.orig

It looks like they are being run under m5guru.orig:

root@m5 /var/spool/fcron# cat m5guru.orig # At 8AM every day, mail reminders to admins as to pending requests. # They are less likely to ignore these reminders if they're mailed # early in the morning, but of course, this is local time... ;) 0 8 * * * /usr/bin/python -S /usr/lib/mailman/cron/checkdbs # # At 9AM, send notifications to disabled members that are due to be # reminded to re-enable their accounts. 0 9 * * * /usr/bin/python -S /usr/lib/mailman/cron/disabled # # Noon, mail digests for lists that do periodic as well as threshhold delivery. 0 12 * * * /usr/bin/python -S /usr/lib/mailman/cron/senddigests # # 5 AM on the first of each month, mail out password reminders. 0 5 1 * * /usr/bin/python -S /usr/lib/mailman/cron/mailpasswds # # Every 5 mins, try to gate news to mail. You can comment this one out # if you don't want to allow gating, or don't have any going on right now, # or want to exclusively use a callback strategy instead of polling. #0,5,10,15,20,25,30,35,40,45,50,55 * * * * /usr/bin/python -S /usr/lib/mailman/cron/gate_news # # At 3:27am every night, regenerate the gzip'd archive file. Only # turn this on if the internal archiver is used and # GZIP_ARCHIVE_TXT_FILES is false in mm_cfg.py 27 3 * * * /usr/bin/python -S /usr/lib/mailman/cron/nightly_gzip

So it looks like I've just got to transfer these jobs to run under userid=mailman.

Now I've just got to figure out how to do that with 'fcron'

What are the permissions on the /home/mailman/lists/mailman/ directory (presumably /home/mailman/lists/ is OK or lists wouldn't work)? They are usually

drwxrwsr-x 2 root mailman

The permissions are a little bit different. Should this make a difference?:

drwxrwsr-x 2 mailman mailman 4096 Nov 4 2004 mailman/

-- Mark Sapiro msapiro@value.net The highway is for gamblers, San Francisco Bay Area, California better use your sense - B. Dylan

Thanks for all of your help.

David Hwang

David Hwang wrote:

Well, I got the cron file to start reading correctly, but now I get a different error:

08:00:00 Could not chdir to HOME dir "/var/mailman": No such file or directory Job /usr/bin/python -S /usr/lib/mailman/cron/checkdbs terminated (exit status: 1) (mailing output)

This may still be an issue with the cron since before, it was able to find the lists/ directory and in particular /home/mailman/lists/mailman/config.pck

There is indeed no /var/mailman directory. I think it is looking for /home/mailman.

I couldn't find HOME defined anywhere like Defaults.py or mm_cfg.py.

Is there somewhere else I should be looking to change this variable? Or can I override whatever the default is in mm_cfg.py?

Check the home directory for the mailman user in the /etc/passwd file. I think the error must be something like that. The Defaults.py variables are PREFIX, EXEC_PREFIX and VAR_PREFIX, but they are set by configure and have to be OK if lists are generally working.

-- Mark Sapiro msapiro@value.net The highway is for gamblers, San Francisco Bay Area, California better use your sense - B. Dylan

David Hwang wrote:

Working these bugs through their logical conclusion....

I got the home directory problem fixed, but now I'm getting these errors. Any hints?

Job /usr/bin/python -S /usr/lib/mailman/cron/disabled terminated (exit status: 1) (mailing output)

Job /usr/bin/python -S /usr/lib/mailman/cron/senddigests terminated (exit status: 1) (mailing output)

Is there anything in Mailman's error log about these?

-- Mark Sapiro msapiro@value.net The highway is for gamblers, San Francisco Bay Area, California better use your sense - B. Dylan