[Mailman-Developers] Integrating Mailman with a single sign-onservice

[Xueshan Feng]

Alisdair,

I have done Webauth using Stanford WebAuth (http://webauth.stanford.edu)
for Mailman package.

Basically users can signup using any form of valid @stanford.edu
address, and I use Stanford Directory to map the name to a user's id.
This information is kept in the mailman mailing list's pickle db, as an
additional dictionary field. Python codes
under /usr/lib/mailman/Mailman/Cgi  are  changed so that if a person use
@stanford.edu address, they are redirected to webauthed page for
suoptions, surosters, admin, suprivate archives etc. 

I can make the patches (40+) or the Mailman Debian package that has
Stanford webauth patches, and local configurations available if any one
is insterested. It won't work for others as is, but at least you can
take a look at one of the ways to do webauth integration. 

I am new to the list and am not sure what's the best way to share this,
but you can always contact me in person. 


Xueshan
------------------------------
Xueshan Feng (aka. Susan Feng)            

Shared Services, ITSS
Stanford University, CA 94305-3090

255 Panama St.
Room 157, Polya Hall
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305-4136

On Mon, 2006-07-17 at 10:27 -0700, Mark Sapiro wrote:
> Alisdair Tullo wrote:
> >
> >Here at the University of Edinburgh we have a single sign-on service based 
> >on Cosign ( http://www.umich.edu/~umweb/software/cosign/ ). I've selected 
> >Mailman as the mailing list software for a project I'm working on, and I'd 
> >like to integrate it with Cosign if possible.
> >
> >I have a few questions about Mailman, if someone familiar with the code 
> >can answer them I'd be very grateful.
> >
> >1. Is there a top-level design document for Mailman?
> 
> 
> No. There is a description of message flow through Mailman in comments
> at the beginning of Mailman/Queue/IncomingRunner.py, but that's about
> it.
> 
> 
> >2. Cosign gives a username in REMOTE_USER in each HTTP request. My intent 
> >is to get users to sign up by entering this username and an email address, 
> >then the web interface for Mailman would take the value of REMOTE_USER and 
> >map it to the email address. Which area of the source should I be looking 
> >at?
> 
> 
> The Mailman web interface is entirely (with the exception of public
> archives which link directly to static html pages) supported by a set
> of CGI modules. These are accessed via wrappers, but the actual work
> is done in the various python modules in Mailman/Cgi/. These modules,
> with the exception of Auth.py which generates the Admin/Moderator
> login page, have a one to one correspondence with the URIs that access
> them. E.g. http://www.example.com/mailman/admin/... is processed by
> admin.py and so forth.
> 
> 
> >3. Would someone familiar with the Mailman web interface be willing to 
> >help further and answer more detailed questions as I progress?
> 
> 
> You can post your questions to this list, and I and others will do our
> best to answer.
>