[Mailman-Users] Permissions question...

[mjn]

I started having problems after some disk issues and some moving of
various parts of my current mailman installation. For the most part
everything is working again except for this one thing: when a user goes to
the web and attempts to subscribe, they get the "we're sorry, we hit a
bug" page.

After seeing the "Permission Denied" error in the traceback, i tried
'chmod g+w' on pending_subscriptions.db and making the GID on
pending_subscriptions.db 'apache' instead of 'mailman' and the problem
went away.

Given that we know it is a problem with who the cgi is executing as -and I
know that bin/check_perms tells me that 'apache' is unexpected for the GID
on that file- how would i go about getting this working "correctly" (i.e.
with mailman:mailman chown on pending_subscription.db)?

Any advice is much appretiated...thanks.

The output to logs/error looks like this:

Dec 30 13:55:57 2003 admin(30998):
@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
admin(30998): [----- Mailman Version: 2.0.13 -----]
admin(30998): [----- Traceback ------]
admin(30998): Traceback (most recent call last):
admin(30998):   File "/mailman-2.0.13/scripts/driver", line 96, in
run_main
admin(30998):     main()
admin(30998):   File "../Mailman/Cgi/subscribe.py", line 76, in main
admin(30998):     process_form(mlist, doc)
admin(30998):   File "../Mailman/Cgi/subscribe.py", line 187, in
process_form
admin(30998):     mlist.AddMember(email, pw, digest, remote)
admin(30998):   File "/mailman-2.0.13/Mailman/MailList.py", line 983, in
AddMember
admin(30998):     cookie = Pending().new(name, password, digest)
admin(30998):   File "../Mailman/Pending.py", line 74, in new
admin(30998):     self.__save(db)
admin(30998):   File "../Mailman/Pending.py", line 111, in __save
admin(30998):     fp = open(self.db_path, "w")
admin(30998): IOError: [Errno 13] Permission denied:
'/mailman/data/pending_subscriptions.db'
admin(30998): [----- Python Information -----]
admin(30998): sys.version    = 2.2.1 (#1, Apr  9 2002, 13:10:27)
[GCC 2.96 20000731 (Red Hat Linux 7.1 2.96-98)]
admin(30998): sys.executable = /usr/bin/python2
admin(30998): sys.prefix     = /usr
admin(30998): sys.exec_prefix= /usr
admin(30998): sys.path       = /usr
admin(30998): sys.platform   = linux2
admin(30998): [----- Environment Variables -----]
admin(30998):   HTTP_ACCEPT: */*
admin(30998):   CONTENT_TYPE: application/x-www-form-urlencoded
admin(30998):   HTTP_REFERER:
http://mailman.coafes.umn.edu/mailman/listinfo/sustag
admin(30998):   SERVER_SOFTWARE: Apache/1.3.27 (Unix)  (Red-Hat/Linux)
mod_ssl/2.8.12 OpenSSL/0.9.6b DAV/1.0.2 PHP/4.1.2 mod_perl/1.26
admin(30998):   PYTHONPATH: /mailman-2.0.13
admin(30998):   SCRIPT_FILENAME: /mailman/cgi-bin/subscribe
admin(30998):   SERVER_ADMIN: root at localhost
admin(30998):   SCRIPT_NAME: /mailman/subscribe
admin(30998):   SERVER_SIGNATURE: <ADDRESS>Apache/1.3.27 Server at
monolith.coafes.umn.edu Port 80</ADDRESS>

admin(30998):   REQUEST_METHOD: POST
admin(30998):   HTTP_HOST: mailman.coafes.umn.edu
admin(30998):   PATH_INFO: /sustag
admin(30998):   SERVER_PROTOCOL: HTTP/1.1
admin(30998):   QUERY_STRING:
admin(30998):   REQUEST_URI: /mailman/subscribe/sustag
admin(30998):   CONTENT_LENGTH: 72
admin(30998):   HTTP_USER_AGENT: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X;
en-us) AppleWebKit/106.2 (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/100.1
admin(30998):   HTTP_CONNECTION: close
admin(30998):   HTTP_COOKIE:
sustag:admin=2802000000699db7f13f732800000030383539333331633561633736313135393238356635316535393763643531313939656365323739
admin(30998):   SERVER_NAME: monolith.coafes.umn.edu
admin(30998):   REMOTE_ADDR: 160.94.212.129
admin(30998):   REMOTE_PORT: 53016
admin(30998):   HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE: en-us, ja;q=0.62, de-de;q=0.93,
de;q=0.90, fr-fr;q=0.86, fr;q=0.83, nl-nl;q=0.79, nl;q=0.76, it-it;q=0.72,
it;q=0.69, ja-jp;q=0.66, en;q=0.97, es-es;q=0.$
admin(30998):   PATH_TRANSLATED: /var/www/html/sustag
admin(30998):   SERVER_PORT: 80
admin(30998):   GATEWAY_INTERFACE: CGI/1.1
admin(30998):   REMOTE_HOST: c212-129.dhcp.umn.edu
admin(30998):   HTTP_ACCEPT_ENCODING: gzip, deflate;q=1.0, identity;q=0.5,
*;q=0
admin(30998):   SERVER_ADDR: 134.84.89.152
admin(30998):   DOCUMENT_ROOT: /var/www/html

--
_______________________________________________
Mike Neuharth
ADCS Technology Specialist
http://www.umn.edu/adcs
===============================================
E-Mail          : mjn at umn.edu
Page Mail       : 6126486512 at page.metrocall.com
_______________________________________________
"What is important, it seems to me, is not so much to defend a culture
 whose existence has never kept a man from going hungry, as to extract,
 from what is called culture, ideas whose compelling force is identical
 with that of hunger."  -Antonin Artaud