[Mailman-Users] having trouble getting webpages to come up

[John Dennis]

On Thu, 2005-11-17 at 16:26 -0500, Eric Evans wrote:
> Hello again,
> 
> >And did you restart Apache so it would reread its configuration?
> 
> Yes.
> 
> >Are you getting a 404 "Not Found" error?
> 
> No, when I try to connect to the Mailman admin web page with my browser, I 
> get a generic Apache page instead of the Mailman admin web page.
> 
> >Do you have any rewriting rules enabled which might rewrite the mailman
> >URL by mistake?
> 
> No, we're definitely not using any rewriting rules.  What I'd really like 
> to know is, what exactly is it that connects Mailman to Apache?  Is it just 
> that one ScriptAlias statement in the httpd.conf?  If so, then how exactly 
> how does this work?  I'd really like to understand the process by which the 
> Apache server is able to find the Mailman admin web page.  There is clearly 
> some kind of big disconnect between Mailman and Apache on our server.

What connects mailman to apache can be answered two ways, both are
important.

1) The proper URL, which makes sure you're connected to the right
server, and it has the right path to get to the mailman cgi.

2) Apache must understand the path part of the URL is to be directed to
mailman's cgi, this is what ScriptAlias does.

For example:

http://myserver.example.com/mailman/listinfo/mylist

the myserver.example.com part of the URL directs to the web server on
the node myserver in the domain example.com

provided that's the right web server and its apache then apache looks at
the path part of the URL, which is:

mailman/listinfo/mylist

ScriptAlias /mailman/ /usr/local/lib/mailman/cgi-bin/

ScriptAlias tells apache that paths which have mailman should be
translated so that mailman is replaced by the cgi location and executed.
In this case the cgi location is /usr/local/lib/mailman/cgi-bin, it will
try to find the script "listinfo" in that directory because that is the
next part of the path and it will pass "mylist" as a parameter.

See the following doc:
http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/mod/mod_alias.html#scriptalias

-- 
John Dennis <jdennis at redhat.com>