[Mailman-Users] Mailman Virtual Hosting - my findings

[MCV Webmaster]

Hi,

New mailman user here. I have been reading all the archives for a couple
of days now on how to configure mailman in a virtual host environment. I
have to say, the documention isn't very clear or really does not even
contain that much on the subject. Oh, I am using MM 2.0.13-1 on RH Linux.

First, thanks to Jon Carnes from earlier today for his post about
modifying virtusertable and genericstable. That was invaluable. It should
go in the documentation, or the FAQ at the very least.

I have come to the conclusion that you really can't do virtual hosting
with Mailman all that well from a single installation; the best thing to
do for virtual hosting is to have multiple installations. Here is how I
came to that conclusion (at least for my situation):

1) When you create a list with "newlist", the info mail sent to the list
manager always contains a base URL from the "real" host name of the
server.
Q: Is there a way to set the base URL and prefered host name of a list at
the time of creation? As I said, I am new to this so maybe I just haven't
seen the right documentation yet.

2) Even with VIRTUAL_HOST_OVERVIEW=1, lists you want virtually hosted
still show up on the "admin" list of lists even after you have changed the
list's base URL and prefered host name. Maybe this is just a bug? Anyway,
I wasn't expecting to see my list there except when the admin page was
referenced via my virtually hosted domain name. It disappears from the
listinfo page just fine (as expected).

and finally (the killer for me)

3) As my server is configured now, I can't run the "default" mailman
installation. The reason is because I "suexec" my CGI scripts for my
virtual domain (via User and Group Apache directives in my VirtualHost
configuration). As set up now, Mailman is not installed in a directory
tree under which "suexec" is currently configured to allow running scripts
from (default is /var/www or something like that in a default RedHat
install I believe).

I believe the only way for me to get around #3 above is to have my own
private copy of mailman in a place I can run my own scripts from under
suExec. If I didn't have Apache User and Group settings, I don't believe I
would have this particular problem.

Those are my findings. YMMV. I hope Mailman 2.1 or later can improve on
this because otherwise, I like it a lot.

Please educate me if I am wrong about something.
Thanks!

-- 
Jeff Donsbach
Webmaster and Bass Drummer
The Middlesex County Volunteers Fifes and Drums
W. Medford, MA
http://www.mcvfifesanddrums.org/