[Mailman-Users] mailman path issue FC3

[Obantec Support]

Hi Denis

think its fixed now. i did install FC3 rpm's via yum but when i checked cron
i could see no entries so as on RH8 i ran the crontab code Big mistake!
anyway stopped mailman (/etc/rc.d/initd/mailman) removed the cron entries,
started up mailman (it put new entries in cron and it all looks cool.)

and i do read the list.

Thanks

Mark

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "John Dennis" <jdennis at redhat.com>
To: "Mark Sapiro" <msapiro at value.net>
Cc: "Obantec Support" <support at obantec.net>; <mailman-users at python.org>
Sent: Wednesday, April 06, 2005 3:23 PM
Subject: Re: [Mailman-Users] mailman path issue FC3

<snip>

>
> 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>
>
>
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