[Mailman-Users] Help with MAILMAN list password

[Anthony R. Thompson]

On 7/21/2010 11:21 AM, Mauricio Juarez wrote:
> - I use mailman to administrate my email lists
> - I need absolutely change the Admin Lists password
> - I used the command: change_pw in my /bin Mailman directory, all was 
> My old password work too, do you know why? I change the root password 
> too ( the same) but doesnt work, now the old password and the new one 
> worked Help plz

Mauricio, the confusion may come from the fact that there might be as 
many as three "passwords" involved here:

1) The password for the entire Mailman site installation (which you may 
not even have if you didn't install Mailman yourself; this is set with 
the mmsitepass command line program)

2) The password for the list itself (which is set when the list is 
created or later with change_pw as you wrote)

3) The passwords for the list owners if they're subscribed to the list.

The confusion arises, I think, because Mailman actually accepts all of 
the above in terms of logging into the admin web interface for a list. 
So you might have changed one but not another, and it's still accepting 
the "old" password because of that.

If this doesn't help, do you remember the commands you used?  (sanitize 
the password of course, i.e., don't post real passwords on this list)

I only ask because some of your terminology is a little bit ambiguous. 
For example:

* "I use mailman to administrate my email lists" - how many lists are 
you talking about?  How many did you run change_pw for (or did you use 
the --all option for all lists at once)?  How many are exhibiting the 
confusing "accept old password" behavior?

* You said your old password works too - where is it that it "works"; do 
you mean logging into the web admin interface for the list (and is this 
the case for one list or multiple lists)?

* Similarly, when you said "I need absolutely change the Admin Lists 
password", what is it that you're trying to protect, the ability to log 
into the admin interface? (such as 
http://yourdomain.com/cgi-bin/mailman/admin/listname or 
http://yourdomain.com/mailman/admin/listname)

I can think of some Python code you could run at the command line to see 
which password is which, but how comfortable would you be with the Unix 
shell to run test Python code there?

hope this helps,
Anthony