[Mailman-Users] Mailman on RH 8

[Steve Huston]

On Tuesday, Mar 25, 2003, at 20:44 US/Eastern, George Cohn wrote:
> Is their anyone using Mailman on RH 8 with Postfix?

I am, plus amavisd-new with spamassassin 2.50 (been up now 77 hours and 
am just about to pass the 1000th spam blocked.  What a feeling :>)

> I loaded their RPM but it looks like it's intended for RH 7.3 and I 
> have
> some permission problems.

Who's RPM?  And for which program, Mailman or Postfix?

> I can create lists but when I try to post to them, I get the following
> errors:
> IOError:
>     [Errno 13] Permission denied:
>
> '/var/spool/mailman/qfiles/f3fc338508d6ec557e19843b6d1b3e54b549b9b3.db'

Check that the permissions on the wrapper program are correct, and the 
permissions on the /var/spool/mailman directory.  The trouble with RPMs 
that aren't made by the distributor is that sometimes little things 
snag you, such as whomever made the mailman RPM might have tailored it 
more for a Sendmail installation, while Postfix uses different users 
for its setup.  I ended up installing Mailman by hand (which isn't too 
difficult, and also allowed me to easily add the ht://Dig patches), 
installing Postfix via the SRPM from Simon Mudd, amavisd-new by hand 
(big deal, it's a single Perl script and a config file) and Cyrus IMAPD 
by hand as well since I wanted to make sure certain authentication 
methods were disabled.  So the only RPM'd packages on the server are 
Postfix and Apache, and since the others are simple to install and/or 
don't require upgrades often, it shouldn't be a maintenance nightmare.

You may want to consider the same or a similar approach; even if you 
use a SRPM, you can at least tailor the package more to your own site 
that way, still have the ease of later saying 'rpm -Uvh foo', but not 
get "trapped" by whatever the package maintainer decided to do for his 
own setup.  Good maintainers will make either multiple packages for 
varying setups, or if possible one which encompasses most/all 
variables.  When you're talking about the delicate interactions between 
multiple programs (especially since Postfix is quite particular about 
its environment), sometimes the ease of RPM isn't worth it.

--
Steve Huston - Unix Systems Admin, Dept. of Astrophysical Sciences
  Princeton University  |     ICBM Address: 40.346525   -74.651285
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