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

[Ivan Fetch]

Hi John,
    Thanks for the reply - this confirms what I figured was the case (but 
you never know right?).

    We plan to just have these users running the Mailman binaries and some 
other useful scripts we wrote which wrap around / combine functionality 
in the mailman binaries for common tasks.


Thanks - Ivan.

On Mon, 21 Mar 2005, John Dennis wrote:

> 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>
>
>