[Mailman-Users] DONE! (was Re: Failed to access config info? [problems w/ qmail])

[Roy Rapoport]

This should be my last email for *at least* two days -- I think I'm
done :)

On Fri, 18 Jun 1999, Roy Rapoport wrote:
> The only problem remaining is that mass subscribes of users do not result in
> all the users getting the welcome message.  ARGH!

This was pretty bizarre.  I think I traced it down to some VERY
anomalous behavior on the part of my operating system (Solaris 2.6
on a clone Ultra 1).  Specifically:

Take user A and user B.  Make them both members of group C.

Make a directory.  Make it owned by user A and group C.  Make
permissions read,write,execute for both user and group, and
non-write for others.

Now, here's where things get very very annoying:
On the following machines:
	Solaris 2.5.1, Sparc 2
	Solaris 7, Ultra 5
	Solaris 2.6, Ultra 5
user B can go into the directory and create a file (touch foo).  No
problem.  This is as I would understand UNIX file permissions.
On the following machine:
	Solaris 2.6, Ultra 1 clone
User B gets "touch: foo cannot create".

For what it's worth, there are no patch differences between the
U5/2.6 combination above and the 2.6 on this machine.  There's some
packages to support the different hardware, and my guess is this is
where the problem occurs.

I originally solved this by changing the wrappers (admin and
wrapper) to be setuid, in addition to setgid, but this was stopping
outgoing mail from getting sent out; my guess is qmail was being
paranoid.  

I just reinstalled mailman (you do *NOT* want to know how many times
I've reinstalled mailman over the last 24 hours :) ), and left
permissions alone other than changing all directories to permission
777.  Not ideal, of course, but it looks like now everything really
is working.  

Sigh.  I'll be talking to Sun support tomorrow and seeing if they
have a clue.

-roy