[Mailman-Users] some problems after 2.0.13 to 2.1.1 upgrade

[Akop Pogosian]

I have found two esoteric problems after the Mailman upgrade on one
mail server that runs Solaris 2.6/Sendmail 8.12.9/Python 2.1.3.

First problem:

I have created a mailing list called "testlist" but I am having
problems subscribing myself to it. After a receiving and replying to a
message that says that I have attempted to subscribe myself using the
web based subscribe form, I get a message that -again- asks me for
confirmation (now claiming that the original request came from my
email address rather than the IP address reported to the web form) and
this continues forever. e.g. If I reply to this message, I get another
message asking me to confirm this subscription. The funny thing is
that if a create a mailing list with some other name, it works just
fine. If I try to subscribe and unsubscribe myself from one of the
lists that existed before the Mailman upgrade, everything works fine
too. It's just this "testlist" that's driving me crazy. I have even
tried to delete this list and then recreate it but I still have been
unable to subscribe myself to it. The subscription fails regardless of
which of my two email addresses I use to subscribe myself or the web
browser issues. To rule out the possibility that it could do something
with Mozilla cookies, I have tried using my netscape 4 which shouldn't
have any cookies saved in it). Has anyone else seen this problem?

Second problem:

The Background. Our web server has several names in DNS, including
somehost.domain.edu and www.somehost.domain.edu. This web server has
been recently configured to redirect all requests to
www.somehost.domain.edu to somehost.domain.edu using apache's Redirect
directive because www in www.somehost.domain.edu has been considered
redundant. This immediately broke all forms that pass variables to CGI
scripts using POST method if the script is referred to using an
absolute URL with the host name www.somehost.domain.edu in it. This
didn't affect Mailman because we were running Mailman 2.0.13 and it
has been using relative URLs in forms. Now, Mailman 2.1.1 uses
absolute URLs in the web forms and it, of course, guessed web server's
name wrong. To fix this, I have set DEFAULT_URL_HOST in mm_cfg.py
which fixed the POST problem for new lists that I created after the
upgrade.  However, Mailman still generates html forms with the old
host name in them for at least some of the old mailing lists (the
/mailman/listinfo/listname web page for example), possibly because
DEFAULT_URL in the past used to refer to the old host name. Shouldn't
these have picked up the correct server host name from
DEFAULT_URL_HOST that was now set in mm_cfg.py?

I was curious about where this dependency on this old host name is
coming from, and so I went to ~mailman/lists/listname and run:
strings *| grep -i 'www\.somehost'

and it showed something like this:

web_page_urlqQU%http://www.somename.domain.edu/mailman/qRU
web_page_urlqPU%http://www.somename.domain.edu/mailman/qQU

I also looked on the administrative web site for those lists and
couldn't find anywhere there a setting for changing this. For now I
just disabled redirects in Apache but I still would like to know
what's going on. Does anyone know how to get rid of this dependency on
the old host names?

-akop