[Mailman-Users] Virtual Domain Support

[Dave Klingler]

I've made various runs at this without much success.  For some reason I have
trouble making some of the scripts work correctly with the symbolic links;
i.e., they just plain won't follow them.  Since I'm using chroot for some
of my system services, I tried using that as well, but cron goes around it.
My final solution seems to work, but it sure is messy.  I use the virtual 
domain mechanism in Apache for web serving, but since sendmail's virtual
domain mechanism isn't nearly as robust, I run separate copies of it through
chroot.  I deposit two separate copies of mailman in the virtual domain's
home directory, one just a skeleton containing the cgi scripts and symbolic
links to the other's data, and the other a full installation.  It takes almost
as long to describe as it does to actually implement, and it works well, but
I've never been happy with the shear untidyness of the whole arrangement.  It
doesn't help that vixie cron and Apache both mysteriously misbehave in chrooted 
environments.

Mailman ain't large, and hard disks are cheap, so I don't mind having virtual
installations.  Virtfs (a virtual domain utility) works very nicely and cuts
my administration considerably, while adding some security.  What I sorely
want in mailman but don't have the time to write myself is the ability to 
just edit the paths in one configuration file to make it live wherever and 
act like whoever.  The spaghettiness of Mailman doesn't currently support 
that (there's some bitterness there).

If someone manages to make virtual domains, chroot and Mailman live together
nicely, please let me know.  I tried about five or six different approaches
with no success.

Dave Klingler

> Previously, Erik S.E. Walum said:
> > We've been anticipating the fabled virtual domain support in mailman 2.0
> > for a long time, but alas, the only documentation on this appears to be
> > a hack (ref: README.EXIM). IS there any further documentation on mailman
> > 2.0's added support for virtualdomains, or was it simply a rewrite of
> > the crontab entries to correctly handle virtualdomains? Has anyone
> > figured out a way to do this withought installing multiple copies of
> > mailman? Any suggestions from the peanut gallery?
> 
> Rather than installing multiple copies of Mailman, might one install
> multiple instances?  That being one master installation with virtual domain
> subdirectories which are mostly symlinks back to the main package?  Except
> for the lists/ directory, the qfiles/ and so forth.  That would just
> simplify upgrades greatly (you'd only have one set of files to be updated).
> 
>  -dan
> 
> -- 
> Dan Lowe <dan at tangledhelix.com>			http://tangledhelix.com/
>   
> Is there another word for synonym?  -George Carlin
> 
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