Hi,

New mailman user here. I have been reading all the archives for a couple of days now on how to configure mailman in a virtual host environment. I have to say, the documention isn't very clear or really does not even contain that much on the subject. Oh, I am using MM 2.0.13-1 on RH Linux.

First, thanks to Jon Carnes from earlier today for his post about modifying virtusertable and genericstable. That was invaluable. It should go in the documentation, or the FAQ at the very least.

I have come to the conclusion that you really can't do virtual hosting with Mailman all that well from a single installation; the best thing to do for virtual hosting is to have multiple installations. Here is how I came to that conclusion (at least for my situation):

1. When you create a list with "newlist", the info mail sent to the list manager always contains a base URL from the "real" host name of the server. Q: Is there a way to set the base URL and prefered host name of a list at the time of creation? As I said, I am new to this so maybe I just haven't seen the right documentation yet.

2. Even with VIRTUAL_HOST_OVERVIEW=1, lists you want virtually hosted still show up on the "admin" list of lists even after you have changed the list's base URL and prefered host name. Maybe this is just a bug? Anyway, I wasn't expecting to see my list there except when the admin page was referenced via my virtually hosted domain name. It disappears from the listinfo page just fine (as expected).

and finally (the killer for me)

3. As my server is configured now, I can't run the "default" mailman installation. The reason is because I "suexec" my CGI scripts for my virtual domain (via User and Group Apache directives in my VirtualHost configuration). As set up now, Mailman is not installed in a directory tree under which "suexec" is currently configured to allow running scripts from (default is /var/www or something like that in a default RedHat install I believe).

I believe the only way for me to get around #3 above is to have my own private copy of mailman in a place I can run my own scripts from under suExec. If I didn't have Apache User and Group settings, I don't believe I would have this particular problem.

Those are my findings. YMMV. I hope Mailman 2.1 or later can improve on this because otherwise, I like it a lot.

Please educate me if I am wrong about something. Thanks!

-- Jeff Donsbach Webmaster and Bass Drummer The Middlesex County Volunteers Fifes and Drums W. Medford, MA http://www.mcvfifesanddrums.org/