[Mailman-Users] A possible solution [re: Messages silently disappearing]

[Wes Morriston]

Hi all,

Thanks to all who have helped with this problem.  I now think we have it
(more or less) licked.  Others who have had the same problem and may be
able to adapt this solution to their situation.

To get to the bottom line fast... the problem turned out to be that
mailman could not create temporary files in  ~mailman/data.  For some
reason, it was trying to write them as uid "daemon," but isn't allowed
to do that when ~mailman/data is owned by "mailman."  The "solution" we
came up with was simply to do a "chown daemon ~mailman/data."  Now
~mailman/data is owned by "daemon" and all my posts get through without
difficulty.

Just for the record, I am using a SuSE 6.0 distribution with a 2.2.1
kernel.  I am not running NFS and there are no fancy mount options to
worry about.  Sendmail on my installation runs as "daemon."  The
relevant line of "/etc/sendmail.cf" is:

# default UID (can be username or userid:groupid)
O DefaultUser=daemon:daemon

Perhaps it is worth mentioning that I was logged in as "root" when I
originally installed MailMan.  (Could that have been my mistake?  I
thought that was not supposed to be make a difference.)  As initially
installed, everything in ~mailman was owned by root with "mailman" as
the gid.  I subsequently changed it so that everything (except
~mailman/data) is owned by "mailman."  (That was to get around another
glitch in the running of the program.)

Just to be clear, here is what 'ls ~mailman' on my site now produces.

total 14
drwxrwsr-x   6 mailman  mailman      2048 Feb 10 09:44 Mailman
drwxrwsr-x   4 mailman  mailman      1024 Feb  9 23:56 archives
drwxrwsr-x   2 mailman  mailman      1024 Feb  9 23:56 bin
drwxrwsr-x   2 mailman  mailman      1024 Feb  9 23:56 cgi-bin
drwxrwsr-x   2 mailman  mailman      1024 Feb  9 23:56 cron
drwxrwsr-x   2 daemon   mailman      1024 Feb 10 15:47 data
drwxrwsr-x   2 mailman  mailman      1024 Feb  9 23:56 filters
drwxrwsr-x   3 mailman  mailman      1024 Feb  9 23:57 lists
drwxrwsr-x   2 mailman  mailman      1024 Feb 10 15:42 locks
drwxrwsr-x   2 mailman  mailman      1024 Feb 10 12:00 logs
drwxrwsr-x   2 mailman  mailman      1024 Feb  9 23:56 mail
drwxrwsr-x   2 mailman  mailman      1024 Feb  9 23:56 scripts
drwxrwsr-x   2 mailman  mailman      1024 Feb  9 23:56 templates

And this is what "wrapper" in ~mailman/mail looks like.

-rwxr-sr-x   1 mailman  mailman     19917 Feb  9 23:56 wrapper

Thanks again for all the help... And do let me know if there is a better
way around this problem.  Why does MailMan insist on writing temporary
files in ~mailman/data with uid "daemon?"  I really don't get it.

Wes