[Mailman-Users] Is it possible to set up and run Mailman withoutroot access?

[Mark Sapiro]

bill.bruns at prodigy.net wrote:

>Is it possible to set up and run Mailman 2.1.5 without root access?

The short answer is No.

>This is on a shared Linux server where we have access to only one user, and
>do not want to give RW access to other users.
>So in addition to not having root, we don't want to use the 02775
>permissions.  Ideally we would run with just 705 permissions.

You probably could install Mailman as your user and group, but then you
would have to make the web server run scripts as that user and make
the incoming MTA/MDA pipe the incoming mail to mailman as that user
and this would break Mailman's security in addition to probably
allowing RW access from the web to everything you own.

In any case, you would probably need root or some other high level of
access to make the necessary web server and MTA configuration changes
to support your Mailman.

>Anyone have any experience with this kind of environment?
>It seems to me that there must be other folks out there who have a hosting
>service that is shared and that restricts root access.
>I hope you'll share your experience.

I think in most cases of people hosting Mailman lists on restricted
access shared servers, the server administrators have installed
Mailman and the users have only the ability to administer their own
lists within the installation.

--
Mark Sapiro <msapiro at value.net>       The highway is for gamblers,
San Francisco Bay Area, California    better use your sense - B. Dylan