[Mailman-Users] Error on attempt to create a List in Mailman 2.1.7-15.12.1 from Mailman Web admin UI

[Bob Perez]

Christian,
 
Your suggestion fixed the problem !  Thank You.
 
You have to set it to wwwrun:mailman, in order for the apache server to
have write access to it too.
It needs write access for creating lists via webinterface.
 
This was changed by the last update of mailman via SLES 10 updates,
therefore is a distro bug.

Bob Perez

>>> 


From: Mailman Admin <mailman-admin at uni-konstanz.de>
To:Mark Sapiro <mark at msapiro.net>
CC:Bob Perez <BPerez at novell.com>, <mailman-users at python.org>
Date: 6/25/2012 1:24 AM
Subject: Re: [Mailman-Users] Error on attempt to create a List in Mailman 2.1.7-15.12.1 from Mailman Web admin UI
Hello Bob Perez, Hello Mark Sapiro


On 2012-06-24 15:36, Mark Sapiro wrote:
> On 6/23/2012 12:33 PM, Bob Perez wrote:
>>  
>> I see the error in the log with the list name I try to create ("list1", etc) 
>>   admin(10317): OSError: [Errno 13] Permission denied: '/var/lib/mailman/archives/private/list1.mbox'
>>  
>> So looks like a permission problem. I ran ./check_perms and then check_db - Did not help.
> 
> What does "ls -ld /var/lib/mailman/archives/private" show?
> 
> What does "ls -l /usr/lib/mailman/cgi-bin/create" (assuming that's the
> correct path to the create wrapper) show?
> 
>> I think if I do a chmod 755 -R /usr/lib/mailman/ , I may break something in mailman.  Did not do this.
> 
> Good.
> 
>> I see that the user "mailman" in the "mailman group is the owner of the mailman files and directories, but after running the ./check_perms now "root" is the owner of the "mailman" group, however he is not a part of the group, so I made him a member - Same problem, even after restaring mailman with ./mailmanctl restart 
> 
> In general, the 'owner' of mailman's files doesn't matter. Everything is
> controlled by group permissions. All the qrunners run as group
> "mailman". The web CGI wrappers are supposed to be SETGID and group
> "mailman" so they run with effective group "mailman".
> 

I fell into that too.

The problem is, that even after bin/fixurl is run, the archive directory
/var/lib/mailman/archives/private/ has owner:group = mailman:mailman .
You have to set it to wwwrun:mailman, in order for the apache server to
have write access to it too.
It needs write access for creating lists via webinterface.

This was changed by the last update of mailman via SLES 10 updates,
therefore is a distro bug.


Kind regards,
Christian Mack