[Mailman-Users] Sun recommended patches breaks python/mailman, help!

[Tomas Fasth]

Farul,

If you want us to help you, you should try to provide a more detailed
description of your problems. For example, what did the bounced messages
look like, what kind of problem did they report?

I have experienced problems myself running latest Mailman (checked out from
cvs repository) when switching from Python 1.5 to 1.5.1. But I haven't had
time to dive into that more deeply just yet. I currently do not run any live
lists, so no pressure on me ;-)

A vague guess regarding the Solaris sendmail would be that Sun's patch might
have disabled "pipe" aliases which is used by Mailman to redirect incoming
mail for processing. I also suspect that Sun have made a major update of
their sendmail codebase to the latest version available on the net. This
might cause you extra headache because of substantial changes in the
configuration file.

Anyway, making Mailman to work with a new version of sendmail seem to be of
lesser magnitude compared to your problem related to different versions of
Python interpreter and it's environment.

By the way, I have done some work on creating a mailman mailer definition in
sendmail. This removes the need for piped aliases but would of course
require a modified configuration file for sendmail. It kind of works, but I
wouldn't recommend to go live with it for the moment.

>So I reverted back to Python 1.5 with mailman 1.0b4, which so far seems to
>work from the command line. However, I'm still having problems with the
>web server, accessing the admin page gives the following error
>
>Traceback (innermost last):
[compressed]
>IOError: (13, 'Permission denied')

So, the web server aren't allowed to access a certain file. Normally the
webserver and Mailman is running as different user id's. This is always a
source of trouble if the permission and owner settings gets messed up on
certain files. But I have no good advise on this, other than you should try
to determine which file(s) is causing the problem and correct the file
permission settings somehow.

>I'm going to revert back to Apache 1.3.0, and if that doesn't work,
>backout of the multiple patches I installed for y2k and security. This
>seems somewhat drastic so I'd really appreciate any tips from anyone
>before doing this.

Try not to panic. You need those sec and y2k patches sooner or later anyway.
I hardly think reverting to older apache releases will do you a bit good.
The most probable cause for some of your problems might be that by making
upgrades certain files get replaced which have already been tailored by you
or other software installations. Thus the break down. In order to avoid this
in the future we need to understand why things got broken in the first
place. Your situation might help in that regard.

Your real problem is that you're the one taking the first blow ;-) A
standing recommendation for now seem to be: do not upgrade anything on live
mailman installations. You have our full sympathy. ;-)

Tomas