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Date:      Mon, 31 Dec 2001 02:18:45 -0500 (EST)
From:      Tim Kellers <timothyk@serv1.wallnet.com>
To:        Darren <backdoc@crotchett.com>
Cc:        <freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG>
Subject:   Re: mailman on freebsd
Message-ID:  <20011231020417.G94813-100000@serv1.wallnet.com>
In-Reply-To: <053e01c191b2$2b183ee0$6401a8c0@crotchett.com>

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I've been down this same road before.  As a matter of fact, I even went to
the length of adding a user mailman (in /usr/home) to try and get it to
work.

Turns out, though, the porter was right.

a user "mailman" with a shell and a real home directory isn't necessary
under FreeBSD (it was/is necessary under solaris 8).

The docs stress that the most important thing is the crontab.in file and
it's proper croning.  That is true and it's fairly simple with (as root):

crontab -u mailman -l crontab.in

The next most important thing in the latest cvsupped mailman port is a
thorough reading of the Makefile.  If you don't change the GID of mailman
to something that both FreeBSD and mailman are expecting  (gid 26, i think
but that's from memory), the web-interface complains bitterly about not
getting the gid it expects.

Also be sure that your apache  www user (used to be nobody/nogroup, but
now it's www/www) also agrees with what mailman is expecting --again, I
think it's in the Makefile.

I use mailman at work to spam , er e-mail, as many as 4000 students and
faculty at a time, and I love it's interface and it's reliability.  And I
was (and still am, on some machines) a big fan of majordomo.

Tim Kellers
CPE/NJIT

On Sun, 30 Dec 2001, Darren wrote:

> I am setting up my first list server on FreeBSD.  I used the ports/packages
> to install Mailman.  Following the setup directions on the Mailman website
> has raised a couple of questions.
>
> The first question is in regards to the warning in the documentation to not
> be root while running ./configure.  I suppose that is so that the files are
> owned by a regular user.  Since I didn't have to run configure, and since I
> was root when I installed the Mailman from the ports or pkgs (I don't recall
> which), I was concerned that I might need to change the owners of all of the
> files in the mailman directory from root to mailman.  Should I chown -R
> mailman /usr/local/mailman?  Apparently, other distributions put mailman in
> /home.
>
> At this point in the install, permissions are supposed to be checked (with
> /usr/local/mailman/bin/check_perms -f) as the user who installed Mailman.
> They checked out OK as root.  But, here is where I realized that I could not
> su to mailman.  I do have a user mailman that the ports set up for me.  But,
> the shell is /sbin/nologin.  I tried changing that to another shell and
> giving mailman a password.  But, that still didn't help.  I still get the
> message, "This account is currently not available".
>
> Not being able to su to mailman looks like it is going to be a problem when
> I get to the crontab step.
>
> Thanks in advance,
> Darren
>
>
>
>
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