[Mailman-Users] Authentication problem - fixed

[fish]

I am sending this to the list mostly for the archives so that others who
have the same problem will not have to search as long as I did for the
solution. I also want to thank Richard for helping me by pointing me in the
right direction so that I could "logic" out the rest.

This is on a basic server intallation using Debian, Exim, Apache and Mailman

The first problem that I was having was an authentication problem caused by
a cron job.

Nov 27 22:03:01 livingsky CRON[23330]: Authentication service cannot
retrieve authentication info.

This was resolved by updating the shadow passwords file /etc/shadow to make
sure that the user "mailman" was listed in that file. The command I used to
do this was "pwconv" at the promtp as root. This allowed me to update the
shadow file without deleting and re-creating the user "mailman".

Immediately after this, I started to get another permission problem

> Traceback (most recent call last):
>   File "/usr/lib/mailman/cron/gate_news", line 222, in ?
>     main()
>   File "/usr/lib/mailman/cron/gate_news", line 198, in main
>     lock.lock(timeout=0.5)
>   File "/usr/lib/mailman/Mailman/LockFile.py", line 219, in lock
>     self.__write()
>   File "/usr/lib/mailman/Mailman/LockFile.py", line 350, in __write
>     fp = open(self.__tmpfname, 'w')
> IOError: [Errno 13] Permission denied:
> '/usr/lib/mailman/locks/gate_news.lock.fish.13366'

Which, after some research through Google, I figured out that I had to
update the cron jobs and thus had to run "crontab -u mailman crontab.in" in
the /usr/lib/mailman/cron/ directory.

Hope this helps if anyone else has these same problems.

Robert Lydiate
icon at accesscomm.ca