From owner-freebsd-questions Mon Dec 31 0:45: 9 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from serv1.wallnet.com (server1.wallnet.com [208.225.162.122]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 86BB837B431 for ; Mon, 31 Dec 2001 00:45:00 -0800 (PST) Received: from localhost (timothyk@localhost) by serv1.wallnet.com (8.11.5/8.11.5) with ESMTP id fBV7IjY95202; Mon, 31 Dec 2001 02:18:45 -0500 (EST) (envelope-from timothyk@serv1.wallnet.com) Date: Mon, 31 Dec 2001 02:18:45 -0500 (EST) From: Tim Kellers To: Darren Cc: Subject: Re: mailman on freebsd In-Reply-To: <053e01c191b2$2b183ee0$6401a8c0@crotchett.com> Message-ID: <20011231020417.G94813-100000@serv1.wallnet.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG 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 > > > > > To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org > with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message > To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message