[Mailman-Users] Mac OS X Leopard upgrade experience

[Larry Stone]

Wasting no time, I experiemented over the weekend with upgrading a clone
of my test server (Power PC) from Mac OS X Tiger (10.4.x) to Leopard
(10.5). It was not as smooth as could be and a number of configuration
changes were needed and I still have a startup problem. However, once I
work around the startup issue (#5 below), it all seems to be working.

1) Apple has changed all the application specific user IDs from ZZZ to
_ZZZ (e.g. mailman becomes _mailman). This requires changes to Postfix
(not a Mailman topic per se) and requires Mailman to be reconfigured and
remade.

2) Xinetd is gone. If mailman or anything else was still being started via
xinetd, it needs to be changed to start with launchd (launchd was
introduced with Tiger).

3) Apache is now Apache2. The configuration file is
/etc/apache2/httpd.conf rather than /etc/httpd/httpd.conf. Customizations
in /etc/httpd/httpd/conf are not migrated. In addition, tighter directory
security in Apache2 requires additional customizations to allow access to
the Mailman directories (sorry, I don't have them handy to include in this
note)

4) System shutdown does not seem to shutdown mailman cleanly anymore
requiring a 'mailmanctl -s start' to get mailman going. I've changed my
launchd startup file to add the -s. That obviously adds some risk but at
least for my environment, it's minimal.

5) Startup is intermittently(?) failing due to what seems to be a Leopard,
not mailman, issue. I'm not at all sure what that "Stray process" message
means and have not turned up anything useful in a web search.

Oct 29 07:36:46 Leoptest mailman[56]: Starting Mailman's master qrunner.
Oct 29 07:36:46 Leoptest com.apple.launchd[1] (mailman[56]): Stray process
with PGID equal to this dead job: PID 83 PPID 1 Python

Nothing appears in the mailman logs but unless I'm mistaken, the "Starting
Mailman's ..." message comes from mailmanctl so mailmanctl is launching
but then dying with that "Stray process" error.

The Leopard provided version of Python 2.5.1 and I have mailman 2.1.9.

-- Larry Stone
   lstone19 at stonejongleux.com