[Mailman-Users] Group mismatch puzzle

[Lindsay Haisley]

I've looked into the pickled files for the problem list with dumpdb and
found no reference to the GID which might lock the "mail wrapper script"
onto the group ID of the server from which the list was exported.
Googling for "mail wrapper script" turns up lots of references, going
back many years, to the problem of an improperly set --with-mail-gid at
configure time, however this isn't the case here, since this was
properly set on the new server, and the problem occurs only with a list
imported from the old server where the numeric GID was different from
that of the "mail" group on the new server.

check_perms returns "No problems found".

What is the "mail wrapper script" to which the error message refers?

On Mon, 2012-08-27 at 00:41 -0500, Lindsay Haisley wrote:
> 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       |  "Humor will get you through times of no humor
FMP Computer Services |      better than no humor will get you through
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