[Mailman-Users] Integrating Mailman 2.0.8 with Tomcat 4.0.1

Tue Jun 4 19:42:41 CEST 2002

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<h4>Installation of Mailman</h4>
<strong>NOTE:</strong> These isntructions apply to Mailman version 2.0.8 and RedHat Linux version 7.0.  If you follow these instructions for installing Mailman and have installed Tomcat 4.0.1 in the /home directory, you may follow these instructions for other distributions as long as all dependencies for both Mailman and Tomcat 4.0.1 have been met.
<ol>
<li>Make a user by the name of <strong>mailman</strong> using linuxconf and make the home directory be<pre>/var/mailman</pre>
<li>Configure the Mailman directory structure : <pre>cd /var/mailman
chown mailman.mailman /var/mailman
chmod a+rx,g+ws /var/mailman</pre>
<li>Download mailman from <a href="http://www.list.org <http://www.list.org"> http://www.list.org">http://www.list.org</a>
<li>Use command : <pre>tar xvzf mailman-2.x.x.tgz</pre> to unpack the distribution
<li><pre>cd mailman-2.x.x</pre>
<li>Read instructions in INSTALL file of distribution : <pre>more INSTALL</pre>
<li>Configure the distribution : <pre>./configure --prefx=/var/mailman --with-mail-gid=mail --with-cgi-gid=root</pre>
<li>Install Mailman : <pre>make install</pre>
<li>Set up the cron jobs : <pre>su - mailman
cd /var/mailman/cron
crontab crontab.in</pre>
<li>Create link in smrsh for sendmail to work : <pre>cd /etc/smrsh
ln -s /var/mailman/mail/wrapper wrapper</pre>
</ol>
<h4>Configuring Tomcat to work with Mailman</h4>
<ol>
<li><pre>cd /home/jakarta-tomcat-4.0.1/conf</pre
<li><pre>pico server.xml</pre>
<li>Find the section commented out that defines the CGI servlet and uncomment it
<li>Find the section below that which defines the CGI servlet pattern to match and uncomment it
<li>Save server.xml
<li><pre>cd /home/jakarta-tomcat-4.0.1/webapps</pre>
<li><pre>/root/bin/newapp mailman</pre> <strong>NOTE: This assumes that the newapp script is installed in /root/bin and the path is properly set.  If it is not available, copy the script from one of the other servers</strong>
<li><pre>cd /home/jakarta-tomcat-4.0.1/webapps/mailman/WEB-INF</pre>
<li><pre>ln -s /var/mailman/cgi-bin cgi</pre
<li><pre>cd /home/jakarta-tomcat-4.0.1/webapps/ROOT</pre>
<li><pre>ln -s /var/mailman/archives/public pipermail</pre>
</ol>
<h4>Configuring Mailman to work with Tomcat 4.0.1</h4>
<p>
The standard scripts and HTML templates which come with the Mailman distribution will not work with Tomcat 4.0.1's CGI wrapper.  For some reason, METHOD=POST in the HTML forms that Mailman dynamically builds will break the CGI wrapper in Tomcat, so as a workaround you must laboriously go through all the files in the Mailman distribution which build HTML form templates and change <strong>METHOD=POST</strong> to <strong>METHOD=GET</strong>.
To the best of my knowledge these files are :
<pre>/var/mailman/templates/admlogin.txt
/var/mailman/Mailman/HTMLFormatter.py
/var/mailman/Mailman/htmlformat.py
/var/mailman/Mailman/Cgi/private.py
</pre>
Find <strong>METHOD=POST</strong> in all of these files and change it to <strong>METHOD=GET</strong> and save the file.
<h4>Restart the Tomcat 4.0.1 server</h4>
<pre>/root/bin/tomstop</pre>Wait for all java processes to stop by monitoring <pre>ps ax|grep java</pre>and then start Tomcat with <pre>/root/bin/tomstart</pre>
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