[Mailman-Users] Re: Mailman on a virtual site

[Dave Klingler]

I set up several virtual domains last year using virtuald, which worked very
well, and separate directories for the mail and cgi portions of mailman.  The
cgi side consisted mostly of symbolic links to various directories on the mail 
side.  I've forgotten now why I had to do it that way, but I seem to remember 
it was because apache sometimes arbitrarily ignored my symbolic links, creating
a possible security problem.  Once I'd figured out what had to go where, it 
was pretty easy to set things up.

Virtuald uses chroot to make the root directory somewhere further down the 
directory tree.  The idea is to have a separate copy of each set of essential
directories for each host.  It sounds unwieldy, but in practice it amounts to
a few hundred K per virtual host, which is a small price to pay.  The tools
are fairly well-written and work well.  You then have virtuald monitor each
desired port and chroot to the virtual machine before executing the 
appropriate service.  For me this was a way to have multiple lists with the
same names at different domains.

I've since switched to different projects and those domains are currently
somewhat disabled or have been moved to their own machines, but some time 
fairly soon I'll be turning some of them back on.

Hope that helps.

Dave Klingler


> on Thu, Jul 04, 2002 at 12:43:56PM -0400, Peter Vibert wrote:
> > Hello,
> > 
> > I am trying to set up Mailman on a hosted site (virtual website),
> > but don't understand how to do it. I have set Mailman up on an internal 
> > server, as a standalone box, and it works fine.
> 
> Well, first of all, I'm not sure what you mean by "hosted site" or
> "virtual website". In my article, I was referring to a server which
> served multiple domains/hosts; email, web, and dns. Don't bother with
> mailman unless you have root access or sudo, and can modify your
> mailer's aliases, possibly your dns, and the Web server configuration.
> 
>  http://www.webtechniques.com/archives/2000/06/champeon2/
> 
> The big thing to remember is that mailman doesn't by itself support
> virtual hosting; all lists are named solely based on the left hand side
> of the address; e.g., 'announce at example.com' = list 'announce',
> 'news at example.net' = list 'news', etc. You can play with the sendmail
> aliases and virtusertable to make 'news' appear to come from the
> 'example.com' domain, but without some fancy sleight of hand, you
> can't make two lists named 'news' (you have to make one of them a
> 'news1' pointing to 'news at example.com' and the other 'news2' pointing
> to 'news at example.net'.)
>  
> > 1. On a hosted site, editing the Apache configuration files with 
> > the aliases will not affect hosted sites, will it?
> 
> Not sure what you mean (all sites are /hosted/ somehow, etc.)
> 
> > 2. I thought that it might work if, instead of touching httpd.conf 
> > I could make actual links withing the web directories to make Mailman 
> > follow them around and execute the cgi scripts, which I would link 
> > to from the specified cgi-bin directory.
> 
> I do know that due to mailman's design, it requires that the path
> /mailman/ be part of the URL, so that cookies are set and resent as
> intended. So, you can't do:
> 
>  http://mailman.example.com
> 
> which would be nice. You must do
> 
>  http://www.example.com/mailman/
> 
> or
> 
>  http://lists.example.com/mailman/
> 
> etc. The '/mailman/' bit must be the first part of the directory. If
> I'm wrong about this, I'm hoping someone will correct me, but it was
> true last I checked.
> 
> S
> 
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