[Mailman-Users] Permission denied: '/home/mailman/lists/test/config.db'

[Bill Moseley]

At 12:48 PM 11/25/01 -0800, Bill Moseley wrote:

I'm posting this for the sake of the archive.  And please correct me if
anything is wrong here.

>File "/home/mailman/cron/qrunner
>IOError: [Errno 13] Permission denied: '/home/mailman/lists/test/config.db'

Here's the problem, I think.  My mistake was that I thought that incoming
mail was delivered to the wrapper program which then sent out the mail to
all the members of the list.  I now see that qrunner does that work, as
called by cron every minute.

Now, the install directions say:

    - Add a new user called `mailman'.  Typically this is added to
      your /etc/passwd file.  If username `mailman' is already in use,
      choose something else unique and see the --with-ownername flag
      below.

    - Add a new group called `mailman'....

So, the user "mailman" doesn't belong to group "mailman".  

When the web server write the config.db file it runs su-guid but not suid.
So you get user "nobody" (the web uid) and group "mailman".

config.db -rw-rw----   1 nobody   mailman      2968 Nov 25 11:35

But when cron runs as user "mailman" it doesn't belong to group "mailman"
so no permission.

To fix I made "mailman" the default group for user "mailman".  I also had
to reload the crontab, as it seems that my cron was caching the gid.

It needs to be clear in the docs that the user "mailman" needs to be group
"mailman" too.

I'm curious what I did wrong, because others seem to install without this
problem.

Also, does everyone have to run bin/check_perms -f ?

I'm running make and make install as
> id
uid=506(mailman) gid=105(mailman) groups=105(mailman)

and I still had to fix the permissions with bin/check_perms -f.




Bill Moseley
mailto:moseley at hank.org