[Mailman-Users] mailman and shared spool system

[J C Lawrence]

On Sat, 15 Jul 2000 18:20:44 +0200 (MEST) 
Holger Labenda <labenda at psychologie.uni-kiel.de> wrote:

> I have a problem concerning mailman running on a shared spool
> system. I have a dedicated mailserver which exports is
> var/spool/mail to all other computers in the net, while the
> webserver is running on a different machine. So when people try to
> confirm or post to a list the adress of the web-server is used, on
> which no sendmail daemon is listening due to the imported
> spool. This means that those mail will not arrive at all.  I hope
> that maybe someone here has a solution for this problem.

The matter of where the spool is is actually a red herring.  It is
irrelevant to the problem or the solution.  The spool is local
storage for _delivered_ email.  Mailman doesn't have anything to do
with mail that's already been delivered.  It has everything to do
with being a place that mail is delivered TO.

So, more simply you have the following:


and you don't want to cahnge that.  If you were willing to change
that the easiest approach would likely be to run a webserver on
HostA under a virtual hostname of say lists.domain giving:

  HostA runs an MTA but has no web presence.
  HostB runs a web server but has no MTA.
  lists.domain (really HostA) runs a web server and Mailman.

Howeverm if you don't want to do that, you can still use Mailman as
follows:

  Install Mailman on HostA (the one with no web server).  

  Make all the edits on hostA for Mailman that have to do with mail
  delivery (alias file edits etc).  

  ObNote: I strongly recommend that you configure your MTA to
  auto-detect and support Mailman lists without requiring alias file
  edits.  I know such recipes have been developed for Exim (the MTA
  I use, http://www.exim.org/howto/mailman.html), and I believe
  similar has been done for Postfix and Sendmail.  (Ask here).

  NFS export the Mailman directory heirarchy to HostB (the web server)

  Configure the web server on HostB exactly as if Mailman were
  installed locally.

  Edit ~mailman/Mailman/Defaults.py such that:

    DEFAULT_HOST_NAME points to HostA
    DEFAULT_URL points to your installation on HostB.
    DELIVERY_MODULE is SMTPDIRECT
    SMTPHOST points to HostA 
    
The result:

  Mail comes into the lists on HostA, the MTA delivers it to
mailman, it gets broadcast.

  The web interface (including moderation and all that) runs on
HostB but operates on and modifies the files on Host A.  In the case
of moderation Mailman processes run on HostB that deliver mail
without a local MTA to HostA for delivery.

Its a little fiddly, but Mailman is specificaly architected to
support such configurations.

-- 
J C Lawrence                                 Home: claw at kanga.nu
---------(*)                               Other: coder at kanga.nu
http://www.kanga/nu/~claw/        Keys etc: finger claw at kanga.nu
--=| A man is as sane as he is dangerous to his environment |=--