[Mailman-Users] Unable To Correct Errors (Debian)

[Mark Sapiro]

Carlos Williams wrote:

>I just installed Mailman on my Debian mail server and am following the
>guide however I used my package installer to install Mailman. I did
>not build from source. I am running v2.1.9-7 and it installed fine but
>when I run /usr/lib/mailman/bin/check_perms -f, I get the following:
>
>email:/usr/lib/mailman/bin# ./check_perms -f
>/var/lib/mailman/mail bad group (has: root, expected list) (fixing)
>/var/lib/mailman/scripts bad group (has: root, expected list) (fixing)
>/var/lib/mailman/templates bad group (has: root, expected list) (fixing)
>/var/lib/mailman/pythonlib bad group (has: root, expected list) (fixing)
>/var/lib/mailman/cron bad group (has: root, expected list) (fixing)
>/var/lib/mailman/locks bad group (has: root, expected list) (fixing)
>/var/lib/mailman/bin bad group (has: root, expected list) (fixing)
>/var/lib/mailman/icons bad group (has: root, expected list) (fixing)
>/var/lib/mailman/logs bad group (has: root, expected list) (fixing)
>/var/lib/mailman/Mailman bad group (has: root, expected list) (fixing)
>/var/lib/mailman/cgi-bin bad group (has: root, expected list) (fixing)
>Problems found: 11
>Re-run as list (or root) with -f flag to fix
>
>I did create the mailman user and mailman group manually.
>
>$ groupadd mailman
>$ useradd -c "GNU Mailman" -s /bin/false -d /no/home -g mailman mailman
>
>No matter how many times I run the "check_perms" script with the -f
>flag, it will not fix the 11 issues. I have stopped and restarted
>Mailman several times.
>
>Anyone know what I am doing wrong?


You're not doing anything wrong. This is your Debian package. I think
what's happening is the above /var/lib/mailman/* entries are symlinks
to the real directories. check_perms sees the group of the symlink is
'root' and complains and tries to fix it, but the 'fix' sets the group
of the target, not that of the symlink itself.

If this is the case, you can safely ignore those check_perms 'errors'
as they aren't really errors.

I suppose check_perms could be fixed so that when it gets the mode and
group of a path, it checks whether the path is a symlink and gets the
mode and group of the symlink's (ultimate) target, but I'm not sure
it's worth it to fix something which is really a packaging issue that
should be covered in the packager's documentation.

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