[Mailman-Developers] Mailman 3: Problem with binding REST server to custom address

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Barry Warsaw writes:

 > >the address 0.0.0.0 to access it from outside of the VirtualBox with Port
 > >Mapping.
 > 
 > 0.0.0.0 is a reserved IPv4 address:
 > 
 > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reserved_IP_addresses#Reserved_IPv4_addresses

I don't think it's a very interesting idea to bind a listener to that
address, since it could only hear broadcasts. *shiver*  But for
exactly that reason it's often used as a non-address token to express
that the network server should to bind to all available interfaces.

 > >I tried with a custom settings file 'mailman.cfg' in my Mailman working
 > >directory in which I set the property hostname to 0.0.0.0. Now when I call
 > >'mailman info' it shows the custom defined hostname in line starting with
 > >'REST root url' but I can't access the API from outside the virtual machine
 > >and the command 'netstat -lntpu' displays that the REST server process was
 > >bound to the address 127.0.0.1 and therefore is of course only accessible
 > >from localhost.

Given the above interpretation, it looks to me like your problem may
be that the only interface found has address 127.0.0.1.  I don't know
much about VirtualBox, but I would look at its configuration and that
of your webserver (WSGI is not a webserver, it is an interface between
Python and a real webserver), despite your simple experiment (which is
far from eliminating configuration errors based on the data you've
provided so far, although it might do so based on information you
haven't given us).