[Mailman-Users] Mailman maintenance from the shell and "mailman" group

John Dennis jdennis at redhat.com
Mon Mar 21 21:34:36 CET 2005


On Mon, 2005-03-21 at 11:01 -0700, Ivan Fetch wrote:
> Hello,
> 
>     We'd like to have multiple people manage our mailman installation via 
> shell access, and are looking at adding their Unix accounts to the mailman 
> group.  This seems to work, but I wanted to verify that this doesn't cause 
> any problems down the road.
> 
>     We could have folks login as the mailman 
> account, but it'd be nicer if they could use their own accounts.

Yes, and no. It depends on what they're doing, but in general I would
suspect this will work fine as long as they stick to using the command
line interface (CLI), e.g. whats in the bin directory. Here is the
issue:

All of mailman's security is group based. As long as the user is just
running commands and is in the group mailman you should be fine.

However, if they edit or create files on their own they will end up
having themselves as the owner, and their primary group, which will not
be mailman. *SOME* of these files have the potential to exhibit
permission problems. So as long as they stick to the CLI and are not
editing python files you should be fine, if they are creating/modifying
files by using a text editor, you could end up with bad permissions.
-- 
John Dennis <jdennis at redhat.com>




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