[Mailman-Users] postmap virtual-mailman (status: 1, Operation not permitted)

[Louis Lee]

After installing Mailman 2.1.8 and configuring Apache and Postfix, I 
had the following error message when creating a new list from the web 
interface.  Nothing online seemed to provide the right answer.  But 
since I've managed to figure what exactly was the problem, I thought 
I'd share with the community.

RuntimeError: command failed: /usr/sbin/postmap 
/usr/local/mailman/data/virtual-mailman (status: 1, Operation not 
permitted)

I followed the online installation instructions to create the new 
"mailman" mailing list via command line:

http://www.gnu.org/software/mailman/mailman-install/node40.html

% bin/newlist mailman

But I think when I ran that newlist command as the mailman user, it 
generated the virtual-mailman.db file in the data directory such that 
it was owned by the mailman user.  Since my data directory has 
drwxrwsr-x permissions, the www user could not recreate the 
virtual-mailman.db file when I made a new list via the web interface.

I corrected the problem by making the virtual-mailman.db file be owned 
by the www user:

chown www virtual-mailman.db

I hope this hint helps some poor soul out there.  Maybe this can be 
noted in the postfix section of the installation manual.

Louie