[Mailman-Users] Mailman on multiple web and mail servers

[Guy]

Thanks for the explanation Mark.

On 22 January 2010 02:28, Mark Sapiro <mark at msapiro.net> wrote:
>
> There is shared information in all of the archives, data, lists, locks,
> logs and qfiles directories. These need to be on shared storage so
> they are accessible to all web and mail servers.
>
> By the 'mail section', I'm guessing you mean the qrunners. The qrunners
> need access to all the shared data, and if there are multiple qrunners
> processing the same queue, they need to be sliced so they don't
> interfere with each other.

I've tried installing Mailman on Ubuntu from packages since it
includes config for postfix-to-mailman.py.
It seems to split a lot of the stuff between /usr, /var and /etc.

/var/lib/mailman looks like this:
root at ocelot:/var/lib/mailman# ls -alF
total 36
drwxrwsr-x  8 root list 4096 2010-01-28 11:32 ./
drwxr-xr-x 45 root root 4096 2010-01-28 11:32 ../
drwxrwsr-x  4 root list 4096 2010-01-28 11:32 archives/
lrwxrwxrwx  1 root root   20 2010-01-28 11:32 bin -> /usr/lib/mailman/bin/
lrwxrwxrwx  1 root root   24 2010-01-28 11:32 cgi-bin ->
/usr/lib/cgi-bin/mailman/
lrwxrwxrwx  1 root root   21 2010-01-28 11:32 cron -> /usr/lib/mailman/cron/
drwxrwsr-x  2 root list 4096 2010-01-28 11:32 data/
lrwxrwxrwx  1 root root   25 2010-01-28 11:32 icons ->
/usr/share/images/mailman/
drwxrwsr-x  3 root list 4096 2010-01-28 12:13 lists/
lrwxrwxrwx  1 root root   17 2010-01-28 11:32 locks -> /var/lock/mailman/
lrwxrwxrwx  1 root root   16 2010-01-28 11:32 logs -> /var/log/mailman/
lrwxrwxrwx  1 root root   21 2010-01-28 11:32 mail -> /usr/lib/mailman/mail/
lrwxrwxrwx  1 root root   24 2010-01-28 11:32 Mailman ->
/usr/lib/mailman/Mailman/
drwxrwsr-x 37 root list 4096 2010-01-28 11:32 messages/
drwxrwsr-x  3 list list 4096 2010-01-28 12:13 qfiles/
lrwxrwxrwx  1 root root   24 2010-01-28 11:32 scripts ->
/usr/lib/mailman/scripts/
drwxrwsr-x  2 root list 4096 2009-06-01 12:35 spam/
lrwxrwxrwx  1 root root   12 2010-01-28 11:32 templates -> /etc/mailman/
-rw-r--r--  1 root list   11 2009-06-01 12:36 .version

If I put that directory on the SAN and move locks and logs to that
location rather than where they pointing now, that should cover
everything that needs to be shared right?
I'm also uncertain of the crontabs since I'm not totally sure what all
of them do. Should I only enable the crontab.in stuff on one of the
mail servers? The Ubuntu installation puts that per machine even if
/var/lib/mailman is on shared storage but I can't imagine all the
machines needing to run all the admin crons?
crontab.in looks like this under Ubuntu:
# At 8AM every day, mail reminders to admins as to pending requests.
# They are less likely to ignore these reminders if they're mailed
# early in the morning, but of course, this is local time... ;)
0 8 * * * /usr/bin/python -S /var/lib/mailman/cron/checkdbs
#
# At 9AM, send notifications to disabled members that are due to be
# reminded to re-enable their accounts.
0 9 * * * /usr/bin/python -S /var/lib/mailman/cron/disabled
#
# Noon, mail digests for lists that do periodic as well as threshhold delivery.
0 12 * * * /usr/bin/python -S /var/lib/mailman/cron/senddigests
#
# 5 AM on the first of each month, mail out password reminders.
0 5 1 * * /usr/bin/python -S /var/lib/mailman/cron/mailpasswds
#
# Every 5 mins, try to gate news to mail.  You can comment this one out
# if you don't want to allow gating, or don't have any going on right now,
# or want to exclusively use a callback strategy instead of polling.
0,5,10,15,20,25,30,35,40,45,50,55 * * * * /usr/bin/python -S
/var/lib/mailman/cron/gate_news
#
# At 3:27am every night, regenerate the gzip'd archive file.  Only
# turn this on if the internal archiver is used and
# GZIP_ARCHIVE_TXT_FILES is false in mm_cfg.py
27 3 * * * /usr/bin/python -S /var/lib/mailman/cron/nightly_gzip
#
# At 4:30AM daily, cull old entries from the 'bad' and 'shunt' queues.
30 4 * * * /usr/bin/python -S /var/lib/mailman/cron/cull_bad_shunt

> Slicing is not a directory structure thing. Each queue entry is a file
> in the corresponding queue directory. E.g., qfiles/in/file. Slicing
> just divides the file name space into sections each of which is
> processed by its own runner.
>

Does slicing still require patching mailmanctl as laid out here -
http://mail.python.org/pipermail/mailman-users/2008-March/060753.html?
If so, is there an official patch for this? Or is the example shown safe to use?

Thanks
Guy

--
Don't just do something...sit there!