[Mailman-Users] Cron

[Greg Ward]

On 27 August 2001, Jeff Baldwin said:
> On my server users are not allowed to enter/edit crontabs... will it
> harm the operation of MailMan if I were to put the contents of
> "crontab.in" into my system cron (/etc/crontab) versus doing the
> "crontab crontab.in" as user mailman?

Dangerous -- those jobs would then run as root, which makes having a
"mailman" user rather pointless.  (The point is security: if someone
cracks the mailman user, only your mailman setup is at risk; if someone
cracks the root user, everything is at risk.)

If you really truly cannot have a crontab for any user other than root,
try prefixing each command with "su mailman" to switch to the mailman
user.  "man su" for syntax details (it's non-obvious).

        Greg
-- 
Greg Ward - software developer                gward at mems-exchange.org
MEMS Exchange                            http://www.mems-exchange.org