[Mailman-Users] Permission Denied errors

[Mark Sapiro]

Beyer, Clay wrote:
>
>The mailman user belongs only to the group daemon


And therefor can't successfully run Mailman's cron jobs because they
need to be run in the 'list' group.


>The contents of both files...
>
>/etc/cron.d/mailman
># At 8AM every day, mail reminders to admins as to pending requests.
># They are less likely to ignore these reminders if they're mailed
># early in the morning, but of course, this is local time... ;)
>0 8 * * * list [ -x /usr/lib/mailman/cron/checkdbs ] &&
>/usr/lib/mailman/cron/checkdbs


This is a 'system' crontab (/etc/cron.d/*) so the 6th field is the user
it runs as which in this case is 'list' which is correct.


[...]
># Every 5 mins, try to gate news to mail.  You can comment this one out
># if you don't want to allow gating, or don't have any going on right
>now,
># or want to exclusively use a callback strategy instead of polling.
># */5 * * * * list [ -x /usr/lib/mailman/cron/gate_news ] &&
>/usr/lib/mailman/cron/gate_news
[...]


>/var/spool/cron/crontabs/mailman
># DO NOT EDIT THIS FILE - edit the master and reinstall.
># (crontab.in installed on Tue Feb 23 14:58:29 2010)
># (Cron version -- $Id: crontab.c,v 2.13 1994/01/17 03:20:37 vixie Exp
>$)
># At 8AM every day, mail reminders to admins as to pending requests.
># They are less likely to ignore these reminders if they're mailed
># early in the morning, but of course, this is local time... ;)
>0 8 * * * /usr/bin/python -S /var/lib/mailman/cron/checkdbs
[...]


This is the 'mailman' users crontab which runs as 'mailman'. I think
everything in this crontab will fail. You probably got other failure
emails such as one from checkdbs at 8:00 a.m., but they were
overwhelmed by the gate_news ones every 5 minutes and were unnoticed.


>What I did was as you suggested, I did a rm
>/var/spool/cron/crontabs/mailman


That is correct.


>I also went into the /etc/cron.d/mailman file and uncommented the
>gate_news line that was commented out. After about an hour, I have not
>received an mail with error messages. Problem solved, unless of course,
>something I did isn't correct.


Uncommenting gate_news in /etc/cron.d/mailman doesn't matter much.
Unless you have lists that actually use the Mailman/Usenet gateway to
retrieve messages from Usenet, this cron that runs every 5 minutes
doesn't do anything and isn't needed, but it doesn't cost much to
determine that it has nothing to do unless you have multiple lists
with multiple thousands of members (it has to instantiate every list
to determine that that list's 'gateway_to_mail' attribute is False),
and it does serve as a check every 5 minutes that every list's
persistent state file (config.pck) is still useable.

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