[Mailman-Users] Rather perplexing set of problems with a new 2.1.14vhost install on a DirectAdmin box -- and I'm new to Mailman

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Christopher Woods \(CustomMade\) writes:

 > Crikey Mark, thanks for your great response

Yeah, +1 to that!

 > Have to cop to it - part of the reason I went with that specific
 > install guide was because I'm working in a DA environment (a little
 > nonstandard to begin with).

"DA" == "disability assistance"?<wink>

 > I was also, as you say, angling towards a setup where I could reuse
 > list names -- or rather, not have to worry about clashes (long run,
 > they'll be used for various promo and mailout lists to industry
 > contacts which may well be the same). This VPS is a shared hosting
 > environment too so I didn't think I could justify potentially
 > denying another user a list name if it was common.

That sounds like a reasonable reason for using the vhost in the first
place.  I don't think you need to apologize, although you may have
misunderstood precisely what the restrictions in vanilla Mailman 2 are
(ML names must be unique per Mailman installation, so if you have a
private Mailman installation you only have to worry about clashes with
lists administered by you at the site level, and of course by domain
-- which is an MTA restriction, you can't get around that by having
multiple Mailmans serving the same domain).

 > Wondering if part of the problems are due to the OS (CentOS)...

Yes, in the sense you describe.  However, other stable distros (Debian
stable, RHEL) have similar restrictions (I don't know if they're as
old as 2.4, but if recent Centos is on 2.4, RHEL probably is too).
Ubuntu is a bit more recent, but given my friends' experience, I don't
know if I'd conside even Ubuntu LTS "stable".

 > Wreaks havoc if you want to use Python 2.6 because many parts of the OS
 > depend on older versions of packages, including Python 2.4.

You should look into Python virtual environments.  In at least one of
the distros I use this is called "virtualenv" in the Python category.
In a nutshell, it provides a semi-open sandbox ("semi" because Python
is sandboxed to a specific version, but you use other system resources
as usual, nothing so severe as a chroot or virtual machine).

 > >From quickly skimreading the SO thread, it seems building python26 from
 > source will be the simplest way... but will Mailman work fine if 2.6 is
 > installed to coexist with 2.4 (which I'm reading is a dependency for things
 > like yum?)

Yes, it will work, but the virtualenv may be a good way to get the
configuration right.  (You'll have to install Python 2.6 from source
or a separate package anyway; virtualenv will only help with the
configuration of the sandbox that you'll need to create.)