[Mailman-Users] so how can I test a modified gate_news?

[Brad Knowles]

on 11/21/08 12:18 AM, Grant Taylor said:

> Why not set up another mailing list that does the same gatewaying but 
> this time through the SpamBayes filter.
> 
> As I sit here and type that I'm betting that the filtering will be 
> Mailman install wide, not just mailing list specific.  (Presuming that 
> this is the case.)

Correct.  That would be site-wide.

>                     Why not shut down your Mailman instance and copy it 
> to another location for testing.

I'd kind of rather not shut it down unless there isn't any other option. 
  We do hundreds of thousands of e-mail messages per day, and I'd rather 
not disrupt any of the other 100+ production lists on the server unless 
there is no other choice.

>                                   Go ahead and re-start your first 
> instance and then tweak the second one for the testing in a new 
> location.  I think that would allow you to run tow completely 
> independent Mailman installs with different features.

Mailman can do that, yes.  But it takes some more work, and you can't 
just blindly copy one mailman installation to another and then expect to 
start the second one up without a lot of additional work.

If you want to run multiple copies of Mailman on the same server, you 
really kind of need to do fresh installs for each additional copy.  This 
makes sure that all the paths are set correctly for each copy, including 
which different configuration file they are built to use by default, 
which different directory structures they're configured to use, etc....

> This is presuming that Mailman will allow its self to run multiple 
> instances on the same system.

It can be done, but it takes a bit more work.

>                                If this is not possible, let me know as I 
> have a system that I could do a temporary install of Mailman and do some 
> testing and compare it against another install that I have.

If Skip wants to go that direction and doesn't have a machine of his own 
that he can use for this function, I think that the PSF has another 
couple of machines around that we could probably use for some short-term 
testing.

In that case, we'll just need to make sure that the appropriate accounts 
are in place, etc....  And one or more members of the postmaster team 
will probably need to be involved in helping set that stuff up, so 
there's going to be a bit of coordination to be done.

> Though, something to keep in mind is that now is not really the best 
> time to try things with the drop in spam with McColo being shut down and 
> all...

In this case, we're looking at USENET spam being gatewayed to e-mail, 
and I have no evidence that there has been any appreciable dropoff in 
USENET spam over the last couple of weeks.  So, this should still be a 
valid test going that direction.

-- 
Brad Knowles <brad at shub-internet.org>
LinkedIn Profile: <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu>