[Mailman-Users] What happened to my archive? Why isn't the archive process running?

[TGPlatt, WebMaster]

LOL!! Bear in mind my guru friend that what's apparent to someone with your
years of experience and wisdom isn't the least bit obvious to a mailman
newcomers like me. Naïve as it may be, we tend to assume that when the
program says it checked permissions and found no problems we're not likely
to encounter permission issues with mailman's own automated processes later.
I know that's a silly assumption to make, but we'll tend to make it anyway.
;-)

That's why I deliberately avoided seeking your help while I struggled and
did extensive testing and research for DAYS trying to figure out exactly how
to configure Apache, Postfix and Mailman with virtual alias domains so that
I might at least have a prayer someday of being able to support more than
one mailman discussion list on my server. As a result of that struggle, I
may not know everything there IS to know, but at least understand the basic
concepts now.

I'm engaged in a similar struggle now in trying to understand mailman
ownership and permissions. I'm not sure I understand how ownership and
permissions play out in mailman. So, I'm forced to proceed with absolute
faith that YOU know what you're doing, sir. For my part, I feel like a blind
man who is flying a wide-body jet filled with screaming passengers into
Atlanta at rush hour for the first time. And YOU and the mailman tools are
my ONLY guides. So, since the check_perms tool doesn't work flawlessly, I'm
relying on you to tell me how to do it right, oh Guru! B-)

Thanks for being so patient and understanding.



-----Original Message-----
From: Mark Sapiro [mailto:mark at msapiro.net] 
Sent: Wednesday, October 29, 2008 9:18 PM
To: webwitchcraft at webwitchcraft.com; mailman-users at python.org
Subject: RE: [Mailman-Users] What happened to my archive? Why isn't the
archive process running?

TGPlatt, WebMaster wrote:

>It looks to me like check_perms has a hole in it, Mark. If you take a close
>look at the error I've been getting repeatedly since early July (see
below),
>you'll see it consistently occurs on the index.html table in the
>/usr/local/mailman/archives/private/mylist directory. Here are the
>permissions on that file:
>
>12 -rw-r--r--  1 mailman mailman   11452 Oct 20 07:01 index.html
>
>Please note that the permissions on that file are 644 and not 664. I just
>ran check_perms on this account. It reported "No Problems Found". Yet when
>Archrunner runs and tries to open that file to replace it, it reports a
>permissions error for that file. In short, check_perms reports those 644
>permissions are just fine while you're telling me they should be 664 and
>ARCHrunner complains they're NOT fine. This suggests to me check_perms
isn't
>doing its job very well.


This appears to be a problem with check_perms. You are correct that it
isn't doing its job very well.

There are a lot of files it doesn't check, and at least some of those
should be checked. I'll look into fixing that. Thanks for pointing it
out.

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