Mailman 3 July 1999 - Mailman-Developers

Re: what is being checked?
by Phillip Porch 10 Jul '99

10 Jul '99

On Sat, 10 Jul 1999, Stephen Modena wrote: > Phil-- > > >From MindSpring, I change my "return address" inside of Eudora to > "shimshon(a)theporch.com". Then I sent a "who" request to test-request. > I succeeded in mailing the list of subscribers to shimshon(a)thePorch.com. > > I did the same thing giving "ab4el(a)MindSpring.com" and it explicitly > refused me because I am not a subscriber. That is yet another setting. I can set the list to show the subscription list to anyone, to list subscribers or only to the list admin. > > My suggestion is: these sort of things should require the "password=<>" on > the same line as the request. If I am a legitimate subscriber, I can > punch the HTML button to get my password mailed to me...it's not like I > have to keep it on a post and would be an inconvenient imposition to > require that parameter as part of the request. > I think it is the way it is to accomidate the different privacy settings. If I had set the list up where the subscribers were veiwable to anyone who had not set themselves as hidden, then it would not make sense to have the password. I would guess it would be relatively easy to check the list settings and if it was restricted, it would require a password. Again, I'll forward this to the mailman-developer list. > Now for a positive comment: I switch my password to a pass phrase and it > took it...and it can use it from the HTML page. I'm about to try it in an > email. > > -- > 73/Steve/AB4EL shimshon(a)thePorch.thePorch.com QTH: Raleigh, NC > -- Phillip P. Porch <root(a)sco.theporch.com> NIC:PP1573 finger for http://www.theporch.com UTM - 16 514548E 3994397N PGP key Key fingerprint = F9 4D 41 7D 25 31 A5 1F 65 93 6B 84 A9 F9 5B 90

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(no subject)
by Barry A. Warsaw 10 Jul '99

10 Jul '99

Cc python-announce(a)python.org Subject: [ANNOUNCE] Mailman 1.0rc3 X-Mailer: VM 6.71 under 21.1 "20 Minutes to Nikko" XEmacs Lucid (patch 2) Reply-To: bwarsaw(a)cnri.reston.va.us (Barry A. Warsaw) X-Attribution: BAW X-Oblique-Strategy: A very small object. Its center X-Url: http://www.python.org/~bwarsaw X-Face: bass bass bass bass bass bass bass bass bass bass bass bass bass bass bass bass bass bass bass bass bass bass bass bass bass bass bass bass bass bass bass bass bass bass bass bass bass bass bass bass bass bass bass bass bass bass bass bass bass bass bass bass bass bass bass bass bass bass bass bass bass bass bass bass Hi folks, Mailman 1.0 release candidate 3 (1.0rc3) has just been uploaded to www.list.org. This is an important bug fix release which primarily fixes a performance problem in the archiver. Since the GNU folks are getting ready to put together their next source CDROM, this increases the possibility that 1.0rc3 will be short-lived -- with 1.0 final right around the corner! >From the NEWS file: 1.0rc3 - new script bin/check_perms which checks (and optionally fixes) the permissions and group ownerships of the files in your Mailman installation. - Removed a bottleneck in the archiving code that was causing performance problems on highly loaded servers. - The code that saves a list's state and configuration database has been made more robust. - Additional exception handlers have been added in several places to alleviate problems with Mailman bombing out when it really would be better to print/log a helpful message. - The "password" mail command will now mail back the sender's subscription password when given with no arguments. - The embarrassing subject-prefixing bug present in rc2 has been fixed. - A small (but nice :) collection of other squashed bugs. On behalf of the entire development team, -Barry

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Performance problems and MailMan
by J C Lawrence 08 Jul '99

08 Jul '99

I believe I've found out how to reliably reproduce the performance problemsI've noticed here at VA and at Kanga.Nu, and which Barry and another (forget name, sorry) have observed as well: 1) Create a moderated list. 2) Subscribe 200 addresses to the list (can be bogus addresses but the local MTA must accept them) 3) Post at least 30 messages of an average of at least 2K size to the list. 4) Go to the moderation page, approve every message, and hit submit. 5) Watch your system load peg and stay there for an obscenely long time. -- J C Lawrence Home: claw(a)kanga.nu ---------(*) Linux/IA64 - Work: claw(a)varesearch.com ... Beware of cromagnons wearing chewing gum and palm pilots ...

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automatically generated password too complicated?
by Gerhard Gonter 07 Jul '99

07 Jul '99

Some of our users complained about the automatically generated passwords that are sent out when a list is imported or if an admin subscribes someone. Especially the ` and ^ characters are major problem because these may be treated as parts of composite characters in some enviroments (` followed by a might be displayed as the same character as à in HTML) and so on. Also, upper case characters impose an extra mental burden ;) Anyway, I modified our Mailman which now has a function (method?) Utils.GetRandomPassword(length) which generates passwords of the given length with a restricted alphabet, namely: a-x, 2-9, excluding characters o and l as well as digits 0 and 1 which may be confused and y, z (german keyboards swap these, in the past, this cause trouble too ;) I would like to offer this patch unless there are good reasons why this should be avoided. The main concern is certainly a higher risk to crack such passwords (only 30 possibilities instead of 64) but this could easly be matched by using 5 character passwords: possibilities strength --------------------------- 64^4 = 16777216 1 30^4 = 810000 0.05 30^5 = 24300000 1.45 As far as I have seen, this patch involves replacing certain calls to GetRandomSeed in a few places such as: bin/add_members, Mailman/Cgi/admin.py, Mailman/MailCommandHandler.py Any comment? +gg -- Gerhard.Gonter(a)wu-wien.ac.at Fax: +43/1/31336/702 g.gonter(a)ieee.org Zentrum fuer Informatikdienste, Wirtschaftsuniversitaet Wien, Austria

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cookie problem ?
by Gergely Madarasz 05 Jul '99

05 Jul '99

Hello, If I want to access the mailman pages thru a different url (like http://somehost/cgi-bin/mailman/, the cgi-bin directory has a symlink to mailman/cgi-bin) the cookie authentication is problematic. It allows access for the first time but after that it wants authentication again. Could this be fixed somehow ? This way there wouldn't be need to configure the webserver to use the /mailman/ alias. -- Madarasz Gergely gorgo(a)caesar.elte.hu gorgo(a)linux.rulez.org It's practically impossible to look at a penguin and feel angry. Egy pingvinre gyakorlatilag lehetetlen haragosan nezni. HuLUG: http://mlf.linux.rulez.org/

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personal server-side filtering
by Eugene Leitl 03 Jul '99

03 Jul '99

Hi. Another list I'm on often goes into regimes with bad signal/noise regularly provoking cries for moderation. Here's a scheme I/friend of mine come with --I'd like to know how difficult it would be to add to mailman (particularly, where to massage it in). "To recapitulate: my original proposal was to establish a pair of lists: fnord-moderated/fnord-unmoderated. Everything rejected from fnord-moderated would go to fnord-unmoderated that anybody who subscribed to both lists would get the full feed, if so inclined. This scheme is simple to implement, but has obvious flaws. To avoid pressing anybody in a single quality metric it should be possible to associate each subscriber with a ranking matrix against the other participants (which could be inquirable remotely). With 1 k subscribers this means keeping track of 1 M short integers, which is tolerable nowadays (besides, this can be implemented as sparse matrix). Each mail will be attached a pair of urls/listserv commands to increment/decrement your individual ranking of the poster this mail came from. The matrix gets initialized with zero. All positive values including zero mean no filtering. -1 means every second post gets through, -2 every third, etc. This doesn't include topic filtering, but this can be addressed separately. To address this, we can agree on an initial keyword pool (META:SPACE:GUNS: etc.) and make the listserv let through only properly classified messages. If a message is unclassified it gets send back with a list of current keywords. There should be a mechanism of creating new keywords, and discarding obsolete ones (e.g. by aging). I'm fairly certain it would be possible to hack mailman into supporting this. Does anybody see any obvious flaws in the scheme?" So, any comments on that? TIA, Eugene

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Another news gateing problem
by Richard Ellerbrock 01 Jul '99

01 Jul '99

If the news server is too busy or down, the following error is generated to cron (not nice)! This should just fail gracefully, be logged and be tried again later at the next cron run. Traceback (innermost last): File "/home/mailman/cron/gate_news", line 119, in ? main() File "/home/mailman/cron/gate_news", line 78, in main conn = nntplib.NNTP(mlist.nntp_host) File "/usr/lib/python1.5/nntplib.py", line 70, in __init__ self.sock.connect(self.host, self.port) socket.error: (111, 'Connection refused') -- Richard Ellerbrock richarde(a)eskom.co.za

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Re: [Mailman-Developers] Bug in GatewayManager.py, 1.0rc2
by Ben Gertzfield 01 Jul '99

01 Jul '99

>>>>> "Harald" == Harald Meland <Harald.Meland(a)usit.uio.no> writes: Ben> I'm not subscribed to this list, so please Cc: me on any Ben> replies. I hope this is the right place to send bug reports. Ben> Ben> Anyway, the bug looks like a think-o in GatewayManager.py: Harald> Thanks for the report, fixed in CVS. -- Harald Thanks, Harald! Also, I've noticed that gate_news is extremely poor at handling any kinds of exceptions if something goes wrong when gatewaying mail to news. I've been getting about 15-20 mails a day from cron about all the uncaught exceptions from gate_news. Here are some examples of the different exceptions I've been getting: [snip] Subject: Cron <list@enkidu> /usr/bin/python /usr/lib/mailman/cron/gate_news Date: Fri, 25 Jun 1999 04:10:07 -0700 Exception exceptions.IOError: (2, 'No such file or directory') in <method FileLock.__del__ of FileLock instance at 81772f8> ignored [snip] Subject: Cron <list@enkidu> /usr/bin/python /usr/lib/mailman/cron/gate_news Date: Fri, 25 Jun 1999 06:06:34 -0700 Traceback (innermost last): File "/usr/lib/mailman/cron/gate_news", line 119, in ? main() File "/usr/lib/mailman/cron/gate_news", line 78, in main conn = nntplib.NNTP(mlist.nntp_host) File "/usr/lib/python1.5/nntplib.py", line 73, in __init__ self.welcome = self.getresp() File "/usr/lib/python1.5/nntplib.py", line 132, in getresp raise error_temp, resp nntplib.error_temp: 400 Flushing log and syslog files [snip] Subject: Cron <list@enkidu> /usr/bin/python /usr/lib/mailman/cron/gate_news Date: Fri, 25 Jun 1999 08:40:04 -0700 Exception exceptions.ValueError: 'unpack list of wrong size' in <method FileLock.__del__ of FileLock instance at 80eacf8> ignored [snip] Subject: Cron <list@enkidu> /usr/bin/python /usr/lib/mailman/cron/gate_news Date: Fri, 25 Jun 1999 08:50:03 -0700 Exception NotLockedError in <method FileLock.__del__ of FileLock instance at 81772f8> ignored [snip] I assume all of these can be fixed by properly dealing with these exceptions. It's extremely frustrating to be getting so many exception reports every day.. -- Brought to you by the letters P and F and the number 8. "You forgot Uranus." "Goooooooooodnight everybody!" Debian GNU/Linux maintainer of Gimp and GTK+ -- http://www.debian.org/

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Re: [Mailman-Developers] Bug in GatewayManager.py, 1.0rc2
by Harald Meland 01 Jul '99

01 Jul '99

[Ben Gertzfield] > I'm not subscribed to this list, so please Cc: me on any replies. > I hope this is the right place to send bug reports. > > Anyway, the bug looks like a think-o in GatewayManager.py: Thanks for the report, fixed in CVS. -- Harald

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Re: [Mailman-Developers] Re: Bug#40101: mailman: unexpected mailman error
by Harald Meland 01 Jul '99

01 Jul '99

[Gergely Madarasz] > someone who is already subscribed tried to subscribe again. mailman > should catch this exception and reply politely, I'm forwarding this > upstream. Thanks for the bug report, this has now been fixed in CVS. -- Harald

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