[Mailman-Users] mailman path issue FC3

[John Dennis]

On Tue, 2005-04-05 at 21:30 -0700, Mark Sapiro wrote:
> Obantec Support wrote:
> >
> >I am running FC3 and installed mailman using yum.
> >now the cron is running but root emails show
> >
> >      Subject Cron <mailman at proteus2a> mailman
> >/usr/lib/mailman/cron/disabled
> >
> >
> >Illegal command: /usr/lib/mailman/cron/disabled
> >
> >i put a link in /bin/mailman to /usr/lib/mailman/mail/mailman
> 
> I don't know why you would need to link /bin/mailman to anything, but
> in any case, /usr/lib/mailman/mail/mailman is the wrapper that handles
> incoming mail. It has nothing to do with cron jobs.
> 
> >and from bash with mailman i get Usage: mailman program [args...] so it
> >seems to find mailman ok.

> I'm not a Red Hat guy so this probably isn't the optimum advice, but it
> should give you a clue.

Well, I'm a Red Hat guy :-) 

You shouldn't need to link anything, especially mailman. The commands
executed via cron located in /usr/lib/mailman/cron are python programs
that have no relation to the mailman wrapper program
(/usr/lib/mailman/mail/mailman).

You shouldn't need to do anything to get the cron part of mailman with
our RPM's working, it should just work automatically.

I trust you installed an FC3 rpm on FC3, and not an RPM from an other
distribution. What rpm is installed? (hint: rpm -q mailman)

In theory what should happen is that when you start the mailman service
a cron file is copied into /etc/cron.d/mailman (its done this way so
that mailman cron jobs don't run if the mailman rpm is installed but not
enabled). The format of cron entries in that file is different then in a
crontab file. The difference in the two file formats is the insertion of
extra field, after the time fields and before the command (this the user
the cron job is to be run as), in this case the user is mailman. Crontab
files DO NOT have the user field. Crontab files are not stored
in /etc/cron.d. Crontab is never used by our mailman rpm. If I were a
betting man I'd say it looks like the /etc/cron.d/mailman file with the
extra "mailman" user id before the command has been passed to crontab
and cron is trying to execute the username "mailman" because its been
passed a file of the wrong format.

BTW, the reason crontab files don't have the username in them is because
its passed on the command line (via -u) when intalling the crontab file.
But cron files are not installed via crontab, they are merely deposited
in /etc/cron.d and thus they need the user id field.

By any chance did you run crontab and pass it the cron file from the
rpm? If thats your problem.

The only other thing I can think of is older rpms used to use crontab
(although not on FC3), did you overlay a newer mailman rpm over an older
installation? The rpm is supposed to remove the old crontab, but it
might have failed to do this, but the old crontab would have had the old
format without the username.
-- 
John Dennis <jdennis at redhat.com>