[Mailman-Users] "Admin only" archives?

[Greg Connor]

At 03:19 PM 3/28/99 -0800, Greg Stein wrote:
>
>I would recommend modifying the Apache config itself. Specifically,
>doing something like:
>
><Location /mailman/private/the-archive>
>AuthName "admin-private archives"
></Location>
>
>Note that you are protecting a Location rather than a directory. This is
>why a .htaccess file isn't possible...


Here is what I ended up doing to make the archives readable by admins (I
already had an .htaccess setup from the listproc archives).  Basically, I
took a hint from the way the public archives were set up, and made another
directory "/home/mailman/archives/admin/" - the idea is that when I want to
make archives accessible to admins, I just symlink them from private to
admin...

[root at poly ~mailman/archives]# find /home/mailman/archives/admin/ -ls
255013    1 drwxrwxr-x   2 mailman  mailman      1024 Mar 28 16:04
/home/mailman/archives/admin/
255015    1 -rw-r--r--   1 root     root          152 Mar 28 16:00
/home/mailman/archives/admin/.htaccess
255020    1 lrwxrwxrwx   1 http     mailman        15 Mar 28 16:04
/home/mailman/archives/admin/test -> ../private/test
255035    1 lrwxrwxrwx   1 http     mailman        20 Mar 28 16:04
/home/mailman/archives/admin/test.mbox -> ../private/test.mbox

Then I told apache to look there for the URL http://.../admin-archives/
with srm.conf:
Alias /admin-archives/ /home/mailman/archives/admin/

Auth was set up like you would expect for .htaccess (once you set
AllowOverrides AuthInfo - doh!  You also need Options FollowSymlinks or
Options SymLinksIfOwnerMatch for the above directory)

In other words, I'm setting up apache with an alternate route to the
archives other than through "private"... 

However your suggestion is a great one for how to shutdown the "private"
script for certain archives and leave them open for others.   One side
effect of that would be that if I protect the "private" script with a
"location" section, the admin would have to type the htaccess name and
passwd, THEN type their list-subscription name and passwd in the form that
follows...  In the short term I think I will probably just disable the
cgi-bin/private script entirely.


My big problem NOW is how to munge the list pages so that there isn't a
link to "Click here for the archives!" (since the archives will be for the
admin's use only, no sense advertising their existence).  But, I want to
disable this without turning off archiving entirely.  I think for now it
would work to just edit the templates so that there is no mention of the
archives (and if some list admins want archives to be public, they can
publish the URL elsewhere).


Thanks for your help... (I will let you know if I come up with anything
slicker, in case you're interested :)
gregc