[Mailman-Users] can root start qrunners? backups and disaster recovery ???s

[Hugh Esco]

Hello all:  

Thanks (particularly Mr. Sapiro) for the help yesterday.  

I'm working on a server which is expected to host multiple instances of mailman in the next week or so.  In the interest of privilege separation, each instance is being built to run as a distinct system user, specific to that instance of the mailman installation, but distinct from each other.  

I just debugged an issue which had stacked up mail in the mta's que for forty-some hours before it was caught (yes, I'm checking out this tracker package described in a message a moment or so ago).  In the end, what it took was touch .../.../mailman/data/virtual-mailman to create a file being sought by the mta, then restarting the qrunners which had all failed for some reason.  

I am unfamiliar with gentoo, being used by our host server, but am making progress in figuring it out.  Apparently there is a file somewhere in /etc which does what I'm used to having Debian do with /etc/init.d scripts and runlevels.  

I want to write a perl or shell script to occasionally check that the qrunners are still running and if they are not, to restart them.  (I can't afford downtime like this).  My question is this.  Since each instance uses a distinct uid and gid, is it possible to have root handle this task in its crontab?  Or am I going to actually have to su - to each mailman user involved to restart the qrunners, or to install crontabs for each that will handle this job?  

One other issue, while we're on the subject of disaster recovery, which files and directories do I need to include in my daily back-ups?  And can anyone point me to a how-to that might describe how to restore from such backups should the unthinkable ever happen?  

-- Hugh Esco 

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