[Mailman-Users] The Mailman CGI wrapper encountered a fatal error

[Richard Barrett]

On Tuesday, November 4, 2003, at 11:32  pm, <adamalex at nerim.net> wrote:

>> On Monday, November 3, 2003, at 12:03 PM, patkins wrote:
>>
>>> The user and group exist:
>>>
>>> group > mailman:x:506:
>>> passwd > mailman:x:506:506::/usr/local/mailman:/dev/null
>> ...
>>> Mailman CGI error!!!
>>> The Mailman CGI wrapper encountered a fatal error. This entry is 
>>> being
>>>  stored in your syslog:
>>> Failure to find group name mailman.  Try adding this group
>>> to your system, or re-run configure, providing an
>>> existing group name with the command line option --with-cgi-gid.
>>
>> Have you tried verifying the group outside of Mailman? For example 
>> have
>> you tried executing chgrp on some file using the mailman group? If 
>> that
>> works as expected, double check the group associated with the CGI
>> wrappers in Mailman's cgi-bin directory. A quick look at the code 
>> seems
>> to imply that either your group file is somehow broken or the group
>> settings are incorrect for one or more of your wrapper files.
>>
>> Jim
>
> hi,
>
> I've a problem with the wrapper too. Could you tell me where are the
> wrapper configuration files ? My problem is mailman can not read the
> wrapper configuration files.
>

There are no wrapper configuration files as such.

For security reasons, Mailman mail delivery scripts and CGI scripts are 
executed by compiled C wrapper programs which are generated by the 
./configure and make install process when MM is built from source. This 
process compiles into the wrappers the knowledge of what GID 
(--with-mail-gid) the mail wrapper expects to be executed as and what 
GID (--with-cgi-gid)  the CGI wrapper expects to be executed as. Only 
if they are executed with the correct GID will the wrappers setgid to 
the mailman GID before executing the mail delivery and CGI scripts.

The wrapper setgid is done to the mailman group which can be specified 
to ./configure with --with-groupname just as the Mailman user can be 
specified with --with-username, if something other than the default 
mailman:mailman is to be used.

You must determine what GID your MTA runs as and what GID your Apache 
server runs its child processes as. In the case of Apache, it is 
normally started as root and this master Apache process setgid's its 
child processes to the GID specified by the Group directive in Apache's 
httpd.conf file, so this latter GID is the one you should specify at MM 
./configure time.

make install puts the wrapper programs in $exec-prefix/cgi-bin/ and 
$exec-prefix/mail/ directories.

> Regards,
> Alex.