[Mailman-Users] Setting up qmail + Mailman on FreeBSD 3.4 (was: Re: help with rather time-sensitive dilemma?)

[J B Bell]

I hate to see someone get NT rammed down their throat.  Unfortunately, my
diagnostic skills are not up to the detailed logs you posted, Amanda.  How-
ever, I can share some stuff that may help in terms of making certain of 
one's qmail + Mailman configuration.

Without further ado, here are all the details of my live, working Mailman
installation files:

In ~alias:

.qmail-foo:
|preline /usr/local/mailman/mail/wrapper post foo

.qmail-foo-admin:
|preline /usr/local/mailman/mail/wrapper mailowner foo

.qmail-foo-owner:
&foo-admin

.qmail-foo-request:
|preline /usr/local/mailman/mail/wrapper mailcmd foo

[All this for a list called "foo", as I hope is obvious]

# crontab -u root -l

# DO NOT EDIT THIS FILE - edit the master and reinstall.
# (crontab.in installed on Tue Jun 19 20:10:25 2001)
# (Cron version -- $FreeBSD: src/usr.sbin/cron/crontab/crontab.c,v 1.12.2.2 2000/12/11 01:03:31 obrien Exp $)
# At 5PM every day, mail reminders to admins as to pending requests
0 17 * * * /usr/local/bin/python -S /usr/local/mailman/cron/checkdbs
#
# Noon, mail digests for lists that do periodic as well as threshhold delivery.
0 12 * * * /usr/local/bin/python -S /usr/local/mailman/cron/senddigests
#
# 5 AM on the first of each month, mail out password reminders.
0 5 1 * * /usr/local/bin/python -S /usr/local/mailman/cron/mailpasswds
#
# Every 5 mins, try to gate news to mail.  You can comment this one out
# if you don't want to allow gating, or don't have any going on right now,
# or want to exclusively use a callback strategy instead of polling.
#0,5,10,15,20,25,30,35,40,45,50,55 * * * * /usr/local/bin/python -S /usr/local/mailman/cron/gate_news
#
# At 3:27am every night, regenerate the gzip'd archive file.  Only
# turn this on if the internal archiver is used and
# GZIP_ARCHIVE_TXT_FILES is false in mm_cfg.py
27 3 * * * /usr/local/bin/python -S /usr/local/mailman/cron/nightly_gzip
#
# Retry failed deliveries once per minute.
* * * * * /usr/local/bin/python -S /usr/local/mailman/cron/qrunner

In Apache config. file (though this doesn't seem to have been a problem for
you):

<Virtualhost xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx>
# IP address masked to protect the innocent
...
# Section for mailmain
    ScriptAlias /mailman/ /usr/local/mailman/cgi-bin/
    Alias /mailman-icons/ /usr/local/mailman/icons/
    Alias /pipermail/ /usr/local/mailman/archives/public/
    <Directory /usr/local/mailman/cgi-bin/>
       Options FollowSymLinks ExecCGI
#          ... other options ...
    </Directory>
# END mailman section
</VirtualHost>

[Incidentally, this bit should also answer the question of the other person
who was confused about what I meant by a "mailman section in apache" for
every domain you want mailman to work with.]

I see you're using FreeBSD--I also had to mess with the Makefile.  Actually,
I think I just totally over-rode the build FreeBSD gave me.  Ah, here it is,
in /usr/ports/mail/mailman/work/mailman-2.0.5/config.status:

# ./configure  --prefix=/usr/local/mailman --with-mail-gid=qnofiles --with-cgi-gid=apache --host=eschatek.com

The "qnofiles" group was a major gotcha, I was trying gid qmail at first.

Another obnoxious thing about FreeBSD is that it constantly messes with
building sendmail.  Going from 4.1-STABLE to 4.3-RELEASE, I encountered
a nasty thing where I had been "helped" by the installation of a new
feature, mailer.conf, which is a central location to control what mailer
gets used for various functions.  (My local delivery got handled by
sendmail again thanks to this, and I didn't get status reports until I
figured out that some of my maillog content was the dreaded evil of
Sendmail.)  For those of you baffled after an upgrade to 4.3, here is
a (probably gratuitous) sample /etc/mail/mailer.conf:

# $FreeBSD: src/etc/mail/mailer.conf,v 1.2 1999/12/29 18:24:06 peter Exp $
#
# Execute the "real" sendmail program, named /usr/libexec/sendmail/sendmail
#
sendmail        /var/qmail/bin/sendmail
send-mail       /var/qmail/bin/sendmail
mailq           /var/qmail/bin/sendmail
newaliases      /var/qmail/bin/sendmail

I hope this helps, and if it doesn't, I hope you do get it figured, and if
you don't and they force NT on you, I hope you find a new position somehwere
in a company that is more supportive of *NIX.  (No offense to those forced
to admin. NT.  Ick.)

--JB