[Mailman-Users] Creating aliases as an unprivleged user . . .

[hesco at greens.org]

Hello all:

We jumped through those permission hurdles and got a successful
installation of mailman this evening.

I'd advise that instead of talking generally about setgid, that
the INSTALL file instruct us to:  chmod 02775 /usr/local/mailman

But that is not why I'm writing this evening.

bash-2.05$ ls -al /etc/aliases
lrwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel  12 Aug 10 09:43 /etc/aliases -> mail/aliases
bash-2.05$ ls -al /etc/mail/aliases
-rw-r--r--  1 root  wheel  1516 Jul 28 04:08 /etc/mail/aliases

I'm on a FreeBSD 4.9-RELEASE #0 server.  I'm a Debian man
myself.  This is my first exposure to BSD.

I, as an unprivleged user, and a member of the mailman group,
am supposed to administer this installation.  Hopefully without
bothering our root user everytime we need to create another
list.

I'm expecting to have to create and delegate out about 150 or
so lists in the next couple of weeks.

I administer an existing installation of 2.0.8 with perhaps 20,
30 or so lists.  I created a shell script which automates the
creation of new lists on that server, by echoing the aliases
into .qmail files.  (Someone else handled the installation on
that machine).  But I don't have to be root to do that.

Is there anyway around this?  Will my /etc/aliases file work
if I have root chmod 664 on the file?  Will I as a member of
wheel be able to edit it then?

Will it create any security holes for me to create a script
to handle this alias creation for me?

---

On another question, I am building a perl script on another
remote server to permit folks to subscribe themselves to
multiple lists by completing check boxes and submitting a
web form.

How can I automate the necessary interaction with mailman?
Will mailman accept emailed commands like majordomo does?
Or can I somehow create a ssh tunnel to interact directly
with the mailman server?  Could I perhaps build a database of
subscribe requests that the list server could interact with
on a cron job?  Are there other ways this might be accomplished?

All help is appreciated.  

-- Hugh Esco