[Mailman-Developers] Postfix, Mailman, no aliases file, neat setup?

Barry A. Warsaw barry@digicool.com
Thu, 16 Nov 2000 16:22:20 -0500


>>>>> "OT" == Owen Taylor <otaylor@redhat.com> writes:

    OT> Well, you can't lose the aliases file, but you can make it
    OT> pretty darn invisible.

    >> From postfix's main.cf:

    OT>  alias_maps = hash:/etc/aliases,hash:/home/mailman/aliases

I do this.

    OT> And the following patch automatically updates the file.

A couple of notes.  First, the version of newlist that's going to be
in rc3 (some time today) has a -o/--output switch that does the
appending to a specified file, somewhat like the way your patch does
(although the file name is taken from the command line and a few other
minor differences).

But the real problem is a permissions problem.  Say you run postalias
as yourself, because you installed Mailman.  Or say you installed it
as user `mailman', and that's the user you run postalias as.  Then the
resulting aliases.db file will be owned by you (or `mailman') and
Postfix will try to deliver email destined for those addresses as your
(or mailman's) gid, but not as the gid you compiled into the wrapper
script.

Thus I found that I had to run newaliases (a.k.a. postalias) as root
for the gids to be correct.

Not an insurmountable problem, but it's a pain.  It would be nice if
Postfix could be configured to automatically run newaliases if
necessary (maybe there already is such an option?).

-Barry