[Mailman-Users] Mailman URL and listinfo

[Richard Barrett]

On 10 Oct 2004, at 21:54, Fred Look and Brenda Carson wrote:

>
>
> hello
>
> I have sought guidence from this list several times on the problem i am
> having but recieved no help.
>
> Is it possible that I am somehow in breach of some list eticate and 
> people
> are just ignoreing me ?
>
> or maby I am unique in being the only person on the planet with this 
> problem ?
>

No, but as you are not paying for a service you kinda take what you can 
get like the rest of us do. Or you could be that unique person you 
allude to.

> anyway here again is my question which is possibly related to this 
> theme
> (mailman URL and listinfo)
>
> why do my list admin pages 2.1.5 while working fine from outside (ie
> www.mydomain.com)
> wont work properly when using the local network address (ie 
> 192.168.x.x)
>

Your problem is probably that Mailman is trying to determine which 
servername or virtual hostname is being addressed by requests by 
examining CGI environment variables, set by Apache mod_cgi and 
associated with the request. It may well be looking for a Host: header 
which will be absent when the web browser uses the private IP number 
rather than an FQDN.

When the web browser addresses the server using the explicit private IP 
numbers this aspect of Mailman's computations probably does not work as 
you want; presumably your have told Mailman its default URL and Mail 
host are FQDNs that do not resolve to the private IP number of the 
server so you might expect some problems.

You do not say explicitly, but it sounds as though you are running the 
Mailman sever on a private IP number behind a NAPT firewall, that the 
FQDN of the server is associated with the public IP number of your 
external interface, and your firewall is forwarding connections to 
certain ports associated with the external IP number to the "hidden" 
internal server.

This sort of setup can lead to some degree of identity confusion for 
the server sitting behind the firewall.

Is there some specific reason why you do not want allow the connections 
to the server, those from inside the firewall to be directed at the 
external FQDN/public IP number? There is no in-principle reason why 
other machines using private IP numbers behind the same firewall cannot 
make NAPT'ed requests to the public server address. Appropriately 
configured the firewall would simply loop these back at its external 
interface, passing them back into the web server but with the request's 
Host: header set to a useful value. You can always use order/deny/allow 
directives in your httpd.conf to restrict access to the Mailman CGI 
scripts if you only want them to be run for machines inside your 
domain.

> Fred
>
>
> On Monday 11 October 2004 04:06, Mark Sapiro wrote:
>> John Fleming wrote:
>>
>> Mark Sapiro wrote:
>>>> John Fleming wrote:
>>>>> I see my public lists when using mydomain.com/mailman/listinfo, 
>>>>> but not
>>>
>>> when
>>>
>>>>> using www.mydomain.com/mailman/listinfo.  I have the appropriate 
>>>>> info
>>>>> in
>>>
>>> the
>>>
>>>>> virtual host directive in mm_cfg.py.  What else affects this?  
>>>>> Thanks!
>>>>> -
>>>>
>>>> VIRTUAL_HOST_OVERVIEW = On|Off
>>>>
>>>> in mm_cfg.py
>>>>
>>>> See article 4.17 in the FAQ: 
>>>> http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/faqw-mm.py
>>>>
>>>> --
>>>> Mark Sapiro <msapiro at value.net>       The highway is for gamblers,
>>>
>>> Thanks for that, Mark, but it seems a bit more complicated:
>>>
>>> 1.  First, I am using virtual hosts, and I would like my lists to be
>>> domain-specific.  Thus I need VIRTUAL_HOST_OVERVIEW to be ON.  It 
>>> turns
>>> out that my mm_cfg.py file didn't contain that directive - (It must 
>>> be ON
>>> by default.)  I did add it to my mm_cfg.py and turned it OFF.  Of 
>>> course,
>>> all of my lists appeared, but I lost domain-specificity.
>>>
>>> 2.  Seemingly contrary to the FAQ explanation, I only have the 
>>> "problem"
>>> for -one- of my domains.  More specifically, with and without the www
>>> prefix:
>>>
>>> domain1.com/mailman/listinfo ---- WORKS
>>>    www.domain1.com/mailman/listinfo ---- DOESN'T WORK
>>>
>>> *****However:
>>>
>>> domain2.com/mailman/listinfo --- WORKS
>>>     www.domain2.com/mailman/listinfo ---- ALSO WORKS!!!
>>>
>>> - - - and a couple of other virtual host domains also work either 
>>> way,
>>> with or without the www prefix.  It's only the first (default) 
>>> virtual
>>> host that doesn't work with the www prefix.  Maybe it's an Apache 
>>> thing?
>>> Any further thoughts?  Thanks - John
>>
>> This problem has been resolved after an off list conversation.
>>
>> The solution was to run fix_url.py against the problem list. It 
>> appears
>> that the problem list was somehow originally created with a
>> web_page_url attribute like 'http://domain1.com/mailman/' instead of
>> 'http://www.domain1.com/mailman/'. fix_url.py corrected that.
>
> ------------------------------------------------------
> Mailman-Users mailing list
> Mailman-Users at python.org
> http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users
> Mailman FAQ: http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/faqw-mm.py
> Searchable Archives: 
> http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/
>