[Mailman-Users] public archives are private

[Barry A. Warsaw]

>>>>> "JB" == Jeff Berliner <jeff at endeavor.med.nyu.edu> writes:

    JB>      I'm running Mailman 1.0b7 on Digital Unix 4.0B.  I've got
    JB> it installed, and running two test lists, and all of the CGI
    JB> scripts seem to run fine.  As well, the mailing lists are
    JB> working without a problem.

Cool!

    JB>      I can't get them to properly archive on the WWW though.
    JB> I have explicitly set each list to "public", yet each list has
    JB> still created it's archive in the private tree of my MM
    JB> installation, and an attempt to get to /pipermail/... is met
    JB> with a 404 error.

    JB>      My Apache alias points to .../archive/public, and it
    JB> works, since I've put a random html file in there and I can
    JB> access it.

    JB>      Any other ideas?  Thanks! :)

I bet I know what's going on, you probably don't have Apache
configured to follow symlinks in that directory.  There's an obscure
sentence in INSTALL that eludes to this need, but I can see how this
might be easy to overlook.

The archives always get written to the private tree, regardless of
whether archives are public or private.  This private tree is not
accessible to the Web server, so when archives are private they must
be vended via CGI (and you'll see that the URL points to a CGI
script).  When the archives go public, a symbolic link is created from 
the Alias path you specified, into the private tree.  This symlink
path *is* accessible to the Web server -- provided you enable symlink
traversal -- and so for public archives, vending is much faster.

See the Apache option FollowSymLinks for details.

-Barry