[Mailman-Developers] Re: Mailman, Majordomo, & MHonArc (fwd)

[J C Lawrence]

<<Originally off list, moved back on list with permission>>

On Mon, 13 Aug 2001 23:41:07 -0700 (PDT) 
Eric Pretorious <eric@pretorious.net> wrote:
> On Mon, 13 Aug 2001, J C Lawrence wrote:

>> What are your problems?

> 1. Basic Administration What sorts of things should I be
> looking/preparing for? 

Necessary actions fall into three categories:

  1) Initial configuration of Mailman, your MTA, and any lists

  2) Ongoing monitoring of Mailman operations for correctness and
  desired behaviour.

  3) Maintenance and tuning of your installation.

Mailman install is pretty well documented at this point.  MTA
configuration, depending on your MTA, can be a bit of a pain,
especially if you have performance or scalability requirements.
monitoring is a question of logfile analysis (logcheck can be a big
blessing here).  Maintenance and tuning just the normal slow
incremental tinkering thing.

Side notes:

  Install a local cacheing name server.

  Configure your MTA to not do DNS checks on messages delivered from
  localhost.

  In the beginning set your MTA for max logging.  Turn it down later
  when things are working well.

  Configure Mailman to deliver via SMTP not sendmail invocations.

  Don't use sendmail.  If you're new to mail systems and/or want a
  pleasant learning curve, use Exim.  If you have stringent
  performance or security model requirements, use Postfix (which is
  not to say that Exim is not fast or secure, it is in fact very
  fast and secure, but the model is different).

  If you use Exim, Nigel Metherington (sp?) has written a very good
  HOWTO available at exim.org.

  Read the READMEs.

> I'll probably find good answers to this in the book and from "just
> doing it."

I can't comment on the book.  Unless you're headed into scalability
areas, its all pretty damned simple really.  If you're interested in
the scalability ends, search the Mailman archives for posts with
both my and Chuq Von Rospach's name in them, and then check those
threads.  Chuq and I (and several others, but Chuq and I
retrospectively seem the one guaranteed common key) have had several
good discussions here on mail system configuration and tuning.

> 2. Virtual Domains Can a single installation of Mailman (i.e.,
> pipermail) _archive_ multiple domains, each with it's own HTML
> layout?

Yes, Mailman can archive multiple virtual domains.

No, Pipermail currently has no supports for customisation of the
archive HTML.  This is one of the reasons many people use external
archivers like MHonArc (and proper MIME handling, charset handling,
etc etc etc).

> 3. Customizing Archive Layouts The very small amount of
> information that I've found would suggest that I abandon Pipermail
> and switch to MHonArc.

Pipermail has no HTML configuration support other than directly
editing the pipermail sources.  Its a great starter system, works
well for that, and keeps it archives in a format that is easy to
migrate to something more capable.

>> Generally, don't bother.  Pipermail, Mailman's archiver, is
>> feature poor at best.  It works for a very minimal version of
>> work.  I recommend using an external archiver ala MHonArc (its
>> what I do).

> How did you substitute MHonArc for Pipermail? Did you configure
> MHonArc as a cron job; Modify the wrapper script; Place a `tee
> mhonarc` command in the aliases.db; Or is there an obvious answer
> to this?

You can tell Mailman to use MHonArc as an external archiver directly
as part of your Mailman configuration.  There has been discussion of
this on the Mailman lists recently.  I'm not familiar with the
details as I don't do that.  See the archives.  

What I do is to subscribe an external account to the lists I want to
archive.  I then have an assortment of procmail recipies and cron
jobs which do the right thing with the messages such that they are
archives as you see at Kanga.Nu.  One of the specific reasons I
chose this approach is that I wanted the same mechanism for locally
hosts lists as well as my archives of remote lists.

> Since you've replaced the archiving functionality, why have you
> chosen to stay with Mailman instead of one of the others:
> Majordomo, LISTSERV, ListProc, or SmartList? 

It works.  It does what I need/want.  It offers the features my
users need/want.  It scales and performs reasonably well.  Its both
Open Source and actively maintained.  

The only other MLM I'm aware of that reasonably matches is Sympa.
Feature wise Mailman and Sympa are comparable with each offering a
few features and capabilities the other doesn't.  The fact that
Sympa is written in perl I consider a huge drawback compared to
Mailman's Python.

> Is it the administrative web-interface?

Its certainly pleasant and appreciated.  Other MLMs have similar.  

-- 
J C Lawrence                                    )\._.,--....,'``.	    
---------(*)                                   /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
claw@kanga.nu                                 `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'
http://www.kanga.nu/~claw/                     Oh Freddled Gruntbuggly