[Mailman-Users] bad cron messages from mailman?

[Mark Sapiro]

Bill Janssen wrote:

>Hi!  I'm a mailman newcomer, and am setting up an installation on a
>CentOS 5 system.  Mailman 2.1.9.  I'm getting these messages from cron
>on that machine:
>
>  Subject: Cron <mailman at uplib> mailman /usr/lib/mailman/cron/checkdbs
>  From: root at uplib.parc.com (Cron Daemon)
>  Date: Wed, 10 Nov 2010 07:00:01 PST
>  To: janssen at parc.com
>
>  /bin/sh: mailman: command not found
>
>What's wrong here?  The cron/crontab.in file has lines like
>
>  27 3 * * * mailman /usr/lib/mailman/cron/nightly_gzip
>
>in it, so I suppose that "mailman" is not on the "mailman" account's
>PATH, but I don't see how it would ever get on that PATH, either.  Do I
>need to change those lines to read /usr/lib/mailman/mail/mailman,
>instead of just mailman?


You need to follow the documentation from your packager for installing
Mailman, not the source distribution documentation.

The basic problem is you have installed a crontab as user mailman's
crontab which is designed to be installed as a system crontab in
/etc/cron.d. The crontab you have installed has a 6th field between
the five days and times fields and the command which for system
crontabs is the userid to run under, but for user crontabs is
interpreted as the command to run.

Either install the file in (e.g.) /etc/cron.d/mailman or remove the
'mailman' entries from between the times and the commands as in

  27 3 * * * /usr/lib/mailman/cron/nightly_gzip

-- 
Mark Sapiro <mark at msapiro.net>        The highway is for gamblers,
San Francisco Bay Area, California    better use your sense - B. Dylan