[Mailman-Users] New mailman admin questions

[Brad Knowles]

At 11:29 PM -0400 2004-07-25, Rob Stampfli wrote:

>  3. Is there any reason to have the "News" qrunner active if I'm
>     not passing any mail to a news server?  (I have turned it off
>     in my mm_cfg.py.)

	If you're not gating news, then it's safe to turn this off.

>  4. Can I invoke the qrunner task from cron ('qrunner -o -r All')
>     on a regular basis in lieu of running qrunner as a background
>     daemon?  I think this is the way it used to work.  It would
>     seem this might be a reasonable tradeoff of CPU cycles for
>     memory for me in my slice of a low-memory VPS.  (It appears
>     to me that running qrunner as a daemon, with the associated
>     processes takes about 25 Megs of memory.)  Will this cause
>     any problems (besides making the cron logs balloon)?

	Bad idea.  You'll just take up this amount of memory every time 
the cron job fires up, but then the qrunner won't exit and you'll try 
to fire up another one at the next period.

	Mailman used to run this stuff out of cron, but not anymore.  The 
qrunner jobs don't work that way any more.  If you try to do things 
this way, you're likely to come to much grief.

>  5. The FAQ discusses several ways of forcing mailman to use a
>     secure apache connection (https).  Is there a way of forcing
>     the admin functions to a secure connection, without requiring
>     the same for the list users?  (Actually, this may be moot,
>     as it appears one can explicitly use https initially to
>     protect the admin password when logging in; encrypting the
>     rest of the session is less important to me.  But, I'd like
>     to force all administrative users to use a secure link,
>     at least during the authentication phase.)

	We tried this.  It's really, really hard to secure just part of 
the Mailman site.  It's much easier to just secure the whole thing.

-- 
Brad Knowles, <brad.knowles at skynet.be>

"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little
temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."

     -- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), reply of the Pennsylvania
     Assembly to the Governor, November 11, 1755

   SAGE member since 1995.  See <http://www.sage.org/> for more info.