[Mailman-Users] Re: virtual hosting

[Will Yardley]

On Mon, Apr 28, 2003 at 12:55:56AM -0400, Dan Langille wrote:
> On 28 Apr 2003 at 0:40, Jon Carnes wrote:
> > On Fri, 2003-04-25 at 06:19, Dan Langille wrote:
> > > On 24 Apr 2003 at 21:42, admin2 wrote:

> > > > Okay I am getting a little confused here.  Is there a good
> > > > link out there that steps an admin through setting up mailman
> > > > for virtual hosting?

> > > Not that I've found.  I've been trying to write one, but I've
> > > not been able to solve two basic problems.
> > >
> > > I've been attempting to migrate freebsddiary.org and
> > > freshports.org mailing lists from majordomo to mailman.  I've
> > > found the administration interface and the the user interface to
> > > be much better, but it seems much more difficult to do things
> > > that are fairly well documented for majordomo. The two main
> > > blocks I've encountered are:
> > >
> > > 1 - You cannot have two mailing lists with the same name in two
> > > different domains and obtain satisfactory results:

> > The way we currently get around this, is to make an install of
> > Mailman for each domain.

> Ahhh, thanks, I've been looking for someone who's already achieved
> this.  I hope we can develop a better solution.  Multiple installs
> are OK for small numbers of domains, but it is very impractical for
> large installations.

Agreed. We would be *very* interested in seeing better virtual domain
support with one installation of Mailman. I originally thought that
2.1.x would have better virtual domain support, but its idea of "virtual
domain" support mostly has to do with actual alias generation, etc., and
not with having multiple list namespaces with the same mailman install.

FWIW, the way we currently handle this is a bit ugly, but works...

We create the lists with the domain name in them... for example:

list-example.com at lists.example.com

Then we alias list at example.com to list at lists.example.com. This basically
works, but the email addresses in the rfc 2369 headers and list headers
/ footers still have the full listname. If there was an easy way to give
mailman a fake listname (i.e., list at example.com), and have all of the
headers match this pattern (list-bounces at example.com,
list-request at example.com, etc.), that would probably be enough of a
workaround -- the actual listname and HTTP links could still point to
list-example.com at lists.example.com (hopefully, some similar hack could
be worked out with the Apache stuff so that the links could be the
simple name as well).

I agree that doing independent installs of Mailman would be a huge
PITA - even if the installation were automated, it would make things a
huge hassle for a large installation.

I believe Sympa may handle this a bit better - I've considered
switching, but since we have a large number of existing Mailman lists,
and since we're more familiar with Mailman, we are probably going to
stick with our current system for a while.

-- 
"Since when is skepticism un-American?
Dissent's not treason but they talk like it's the same..."
(Sleater-Kinney - "Combat Rock")