[Mailman-Users] Group mismatch puzzle

[Lindsay Haisley]

I've set up mailman 2.1.15 on a new server, properly configured with
"--with-mail-gid=mail" and I can create lists from scratch on it, and
they appear to be working perfectly.

I have a number of lists on an older server, however, (also running
mailman) which I want to move to the new server.  I have a script which
I've used previously with good results to do this which creates three
tarballs:

* The contents of the directory /var/lib/mailman/lists/<listname>
* The archive files under /var/lib/mailman/private/<listname>
* The mbox file in /var/lib/mailman/private/<listname>.mbox

Additionally a flag file indicates whether or not archives are public.

The receiving server has a script which just undoes this, putting all
the files in the right place and creating a symlink
in /var/lib/mailman/public if the flag file is present indicating that
the list has public archives.

This script pair worked perfectly for moving lists between servers using
the same Linux distribution, but at this point I'm moving from a server
running Gentoo Linux to one running Ubuntu Server Linux, where the GID
table is somewhat different.  When I try to post to a _moved_ list, I
get a failure with the following error in the mail logs:

        Group mismatch error.  Mailman expected the mail
        wrapper script to be executed as group "mail", but
        the system's mail server executed the mail script as
        group "man".  Try tweaking the mail server to run the
        script as group "mail", or re-run configure, 
        providing the command line option `--with-mail-gid=man'.
        
        [i.e.  "mail" != "man"]
        
It seems that the group "mail" has a GID of 12 on the old server,
however this GID corresponds to the group "man" on the new server and
"mail" has a GID of 8.  All the group ownerships of the pickle files and
archive files are proper on the new server (group "mailman") so the GID
if 12 must be encoded as a number somewhere _within_ the list files
imported from the old server, and when the list is put in place on new
server, the GID is matched up with the group "man", and a group mismatch
is flagged.

Does anyone have any idea how to fix this?  I can't find any way to
access the mail wrapper script GID in the list web UI (which apparently
is stored per-list since lists created _on_ the server work OK).  I have
bunch of lists to move, so this will need to be fixed.  Recreating all
lists manually with their thousands of administrator and user prefs is
out of the question!

-- 
Lindsay Haisley       | "Real programmers use butterflies"
FMP Computer Services |
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