[Mailman-Users] Mailman, Lighttpd, & file permissions

[Mark Sapiro]

Jeffrey Rice wrote:

>This seems like it should be in a FAQ somewhere, but I can't find the 
>answer there or in the archives.


See
<http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=site%3Amail.python.org++inurl%3Amailman++chroot>


>I am setting up Mailman to run with my chrooted Lighttpd installation. 


Mailman is not designed or intended to be run in this way. Mailman is
normally installed with all of its files and directories in Mailman's
group with appropriate group permissions and the cgi-bin wrappers run
as SETGID.


>Lighttpd runs as www-data:www-data, and is chrooted to /var/www. 
>Mailman is running is list:list, as installed by the Debian package.  I 
>am trying to work out the best way to get the file permissions sorted 
>out.  These should be more-or-less the same as would be needed for 
>Apache.  Is there a good reference for this?


See above.


>A number of directories I have chowned to www-data: the cgi-bin, and so 
>on.  But I am unclear on which directories mailman itself needs to have 
>write access to, or the most elegant way to resolve this.


A normal Mailman installation has the following directories: Mailman,
archives, bin, cgi-bin, cron, data, lists, locks, logs, mail,
messages, pythonlib, qfiles, scripts, spam, templates and tests.

The 'tests' directory is only used if you run unit tests. Other than
that, Mailman (the qrunners started by bin/mailmanctl), the incoming
MTA via the mail/mailman wrapper and the web server via the cgi-bin/*
wrappers need to be able to read everything and write to the archives,
data, lists, locks, logs, qfiles and spam directories.


>Does anyone simply run mailman as www-data?  When I tried adding 
>www-data to the list group, it didn't solve the errors I was getting.


You will probably get group mismatch errors. See
<http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/faqw-mm.py?req=show&file=faq06.016.htp>
for more info.

-- 
Mark Sapiro <msapiro at value.net>       The highway is for gamblers,
San Francisco Bay Area, California    better use your sense - B. Dylan