[Mailman-Users] Apache Proxy Mailman and Virtual Domains

[Caylan Van Larson]

Afternoon,

I'm a recent convert from majordomo to Mailman, here are a couple 
questions.  I've read through all available docs, and scoured the 
net... hoping to make a final conclusion here and add to our wiki 
later.

Before I jabber, heres the version info:  Debian Linux Stable w/ 
backported 2.1.4-2 mailman/postfix packages.

Apache is being used to proxy from our mail server with Mailman 
installed, to our main web server.  This way, the Mailman web interface 
can live happily amongst all the web-applications.  To do this, I made 
sure the DEFAULT_URL_HOST was that of my web server and that the apache 
configuration contained a ServerName equal to DEFAULT_URL_HOST.  I read 
through all the docs and followed directions, but I still couldn't get 
the web interface to show DEFAULT_URL_HOST when links were created, it 
would always reference the mail servers hostname.  I modified 
/usr/lib/mailman/Mailman/Utils.py and commented out any last hope of it 
ever happening again:

--SNIP
def get_domain():
     #host = os.environ.get('HTTP_HOST', os.environ.get('SERVER_NAME'))
     #port = os.environ.get('SERVER_PORT')
     # Strip off the port if there is one
     ##if port and host.endswith(':' + port):
     ##     host = host[:-len(port)-1]
     #if mm_cfg.VIRTUAL_HOST_OVERVIEW and host:
     #    return host.lower()
     #else:
         # See the note in Defaults.py concerning DEFAULT_HOST_NAME
         # vs. DEFAULT_EMAIL_HOST.
         hostname = mm_cfg.DEFAULT_HOST_NAME or mm_cfg.DEFAULT_URL_HOST
         return hostname.lower()
--SNAP

Question, why in the world did I have to go to all this trouble?

Once I had this working, I moved onto my next task, which was making 
sure that our 2 other virtual domains worked with Mailman.  I read 
through the README.POSTFIX.gz plenty of times and found no reference of 
virtual_alias_maps in the man pages, online docs, or offline book 
references, so I'm going to assume we are talking about virtual_maps.  
For the longest time I was trying so hard to get this to work, assuming 
I could have two lists of the same name under different virtual 
domains.  However, after my 4-hour struggle of reading, testing, 
debugging I came across this little tidbit in TODO.gz:

--SNIP
     - Allow lists of the same name in two different virtual domains
--SNAP

Can someone explain this? and why this gentlemen makes it look so easy?
	http://mail.python.org/pipermail/mailman-users/2004-January/033869.html

Where in the world is it  "actually in the docs :-)" I'd be so happy to 
find it!

Thanks for your help,

Caylan


PS: In case anyone is interested, here is my configuration for getting 
the front-end instance of Apache to proxy a mailman installation.

httpd.conf
--SNIP
    LoadModule proxy_module /usr/lib/apache/1.3/libproxy.so
    ...
     # Proxy Mailman's Web Interface
     ProxyPass /cgi-bin/mailman 
http://betamax.aero.und.edu/cgi-bin/mailman
     ProxyPassReverse /cgi-bin/mailman 
http://betamax.aero.und.edu/cgi-bin/mailman
     ProxyPass /mailman http://betamax.aero.und.edu/cgi-bin/mailman
     ProxyPassReverse /mailman 
http://betamax.aero.und.edu/cgi-bin/mailman
     ProxyPass /images/mailman http://betamax.aero.und.edu/images/mailman
     ProxyPassReverse /images/mailman 
http://betamax.aero.und.edu/images/mailman
--SNAP

PSS: Here is my full documentation, which will be finalized once our 
installation is ... finalized.
	https://portal.aero.und.edu/twiki/bin/view/Know/DebianLinuxMailman