[Mailman-Users] mailman user password

[tanstaafl at libertytrek.org]

On 8/2/2009 5:13 AM, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
> It's not supposed to work.  mailman privileges should only be
> accessible by the system administrator, ie, someone who has the root
> password.

Ah, ok, that makes sense...

> It's not a problem with the password for the mailman user. :-)
> 
> The init script itself may be broken.  AFAIK, the init script should
> be invoking the set-gid binary called "mailman" or "wrapper".  This
> just cleans up the environment, changes the effective user id to
> mailman, and execs the command specified.  (There's no good reason for
> *any* mailman program to be on anybody's PATH,

Iirc, with gentoo it is only for the mailman user, so running the
command as su - mailman gets the path/prefix...

> The best thing to do at this point is to run the check_perms script
> provided with mailman.  It usually resides in $prefix/lib/mailman/bin,
> but since your installation is non-standard, you may have to search
> a bit.

I thought about doing that, but the 'authentication failure' I got in
the logs was leading me to believe it was a mailman user passwd issue,
but now, after your explanation and looking more closely at the error, I
see it wasn't having trouble with the execution of the mailman start
command, it was having trouble with the su - mailman command... man, I
hate being so blind for a sighted person... ;)

I'll check this when I get into the office in a few hours...

Thanks Stephen...