[Mailman-Users] Broken mailman

[Donovan R. Palmer]

Hey Mark - your jedi instinct was on track....

>>When starting up the mailman service, I get the following error:
>>
>>mazar:/usr/lib/mailman # service mailman start
>>Starting mailman (Warning: the Apache2 webinterface for Mailman has not 
>>been activated!) 
>>done
>
>
> This appears to be specific to your Mailman package, whatever that is.
> The Mailman project distribution issues no such message, but all it
> seems to be saying is your web server isn't running when you start
> Mailman. This should not be a problem for Mailman except that you
> can't use the web interface until you start the web server.

Yes, I have learned a heck of a lot about Mailman today. I hate the pain 
when something breaks, but in trying to fix it, you generally learn a lot. 
What I found is that an RPM package I had installed dropped the apache 
server flag "MAILMAN"  I still don' t know why either, but it is working 
again.


>>bin/config_list -i data/sitelist.cfg allstaff
>
> The data/sitelist.cfg list configuration is intended to be used only
> for the site ('mailman') list. For any other list, you ar probably
> better off with the normal defaults.

That was a typo... I was actually trying to configure the mailman list. I 
saved my mailman files and decided to do a full reinstall.

>>I receive the following error
>>
>>  File "bin/config_list", line 362, in <module>
>>    main()
>>  File "bin/config_list", line 357, in main
>>    do_input(listname, infile, checkonly, verbose)
>>  File "bin/config_list", line 263, in do_input
>>    execfile(infile, globals)
>>IOError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: 'data/sitelist.cfg'
>>
>>Any suggestions on what could be the problem and how to debug this? I have 
>>dug around a fair bit this morning and don't have a clue as to what the 
>>problem is or why it even broke in the first place.
>
>
> This error occurs because there is no data/sitelist.cfg file. Either it
> has been removed or was never included in your package or possibly
> mailman's data/ directory is not in the same parent directory
> (/usr/lib/mailman ?) as Mailman's bin/ directory.
>
> As far as I can tell from what you've provided, Mailman is not broken.
> The problems are only that Apache wasn't running when you started
> Mailman, and a file that you don't need anyway may be missing.

The data/sitelist.cfg is there, which is what puzzles me. You were correct 
again though, even with this error, I have been able to get things up and 
running again.

Thanks a lot for your help!

Donovan