[Mailman-Users] htdig authorization problem (fixed)

[Hank van Cleef]

I'll sum up the problem I was encountering, and post the fix.  I note of
thanks to Mark, who worked with me offlist to get a diagnosis.   As with
many things, what was wrong was blatantly obvious---after the fact.

Symptoms:  On a new Mailman installation, with the htdig patch and htdig
program installed, validation failed when attempting to look at search
returns or to run a second modified search.  Entering a value user name
or a valid user password in the validation form would allow viewing a
returned page, but had to be repeated for every page viewed.  

Diagnosis:  The URL in the htdig data base was different from that 
in Mailman.   

Solution:  
1.  Run blow_away_htdig against the affected list.
2.  Post a single posting to the affected list.
3.  Manually run the nightly_htdig utility that is in the mailman
crontab.  

What is significant is the answer to "how did we get into this jam in
the first place?"

This installation was set up on a new host site, to host a mail list 
that had run for years on another host site.   Included in moving the
list host was a domain name registration used as a virtual domain name.

For test, the new list was set up for test at the new host site configured 
"mylist at newdomain,net."  The old host continued to run in parallel as
"mylist at aliasdomain.com" until it was clear that the new host was ready
to take over for the old one.  A part of the new site test configuration
included setting up list archives with htdig.  

The transfer was accomplished by moving the domain registration DNS IP's
from the old site to the new.  Access to the new site's LAN is via a
router NAT table.  Except for setting up the MTA (sendmail) to handle 
mail for for alisasdomain.com, the new host treated the new name as a
synonym for the old.

Several days later, the site administrator ran 
bin/withlist -l -r fix_url listname
This was considered a cosmetic change, and a quick check showed all of
the web pages associated with the list as "working properly" with the 
alias name in place of the site domain name.  

Not so.  This is what broke the htdig access.  Since htdig is an add-on
to Mailman, the existing data bases have to be recreated through the
steps outlined above.  

Once again, my thanks to Mark Sapiro for following this through with me.

Hank

-- 
Hank van Cleef (vancleef at lostwells.net, hvanclee at nyx.net)
1986 420SEL "A stranger in paradise" (Fremont Co. Wyoming)
1986 GMC 1500 6.2 diesel pickup "Seen one, seen them all"