[Mailman-Users] public archive points to private archive directory

[Mark Sapiro]

Russell L. Carter wrote:

>I've just brought up mailman on a debian-testing box
>and almost everything works. (Hooray!) The problem I'm having
>is that after creating a list, subscribing a user, and
>sending a message to the list, I go to the list info
>page:
>
>http://lists.pinyon.org/listinfo/testing3
>
>and click on ... visit the Testing3 Archives with
>link:
>
>http://lists.pinyon.org/pipermail/testing3/
>
>and I get
>
>Forbidden
>
>You don't have permission to access /pipermail/testing3/ on this server.
>
[...]
>Here's the permissions trail (after bin/check_perms -f):
>
[...]
>drwxrws--- 6 list list 4096 Oct 27 15:09 archives/private/
[...]
>Hmm, archives/public/testing3 points to archives/private/... but
>apache running as www-data can't access archives/private because
>private is list:list and with no world readers (as it should be).


[...]
>However the list testing3 is configured to have *public* archives.
>So... why is the public archive pointing to the private one?


Because the archives are always in the archives/private/ tree and
archives/public contains only symlinks to archives/public.

If this were not the case, changing an archive from private to public
or vice versa would require moving the tree rather than just
adding/removing a symlink.


>What's the Right Way to fix this so that clicking the visit archives
>link on a new list doesn't result in a 403 Forbidden barf?


Make the archives/private/ directory searchable by the web server.
Either

chown www-data:list archives/private

or

chmod o+x archives/private.

See section 4 of the installation manual at
<http://www.list.org/mailman-install/node9.html>. Also see
<http://wiki.list.org/x/OIDD>, and if this is the way the Debian
package installs, report this to Debian as a packaging bug.

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