[Mailman-Users] Lists created via web admin seem to beentirelyseparate from lists created from command line

[Mark Sapiro]

Mark Leone wrote:

>Yes the ScriptAlias is pointing to /usr/lib/cgi-bin/. At that location I 
>see the mailman executables which correspond to the various web 
>functions, as expected. I searched for other instances of these same 
>executables using locate,


Is your locate index up to date?

Search for files named config.pck. See if there is more than one lists/
directory containing things like lists/LISTNAME/config.pck.
Preferrably use 'find / -name config.pck'.


>and all I found was a location where three 
>executables with the same name (admin, confirm, and subscribe) at 
>/var/lib/mailman/scripts. I don't know if these locations are equivalent 
>or not.


The files in /usr/lib/cgi-bin/ are compiled binary wrappers (so they
can be SETGID) that do nothing more than validate the real GID and
then invoke the python script. I am however surprised that the scripts
are in /var and not /usr.

If you do 'strings' on the files in /usr/lib/cgi-bin/, you should see
the path to the scripts directory they're using. E.g.

[mark at sbh16 ~]$ strings mmp/cgi-bin/admin | grep scripts
/usr/local/mailman/scripts/


>These are the locations where the Ubuntu ppa installer placed them. I 
>realize this list is not the place to ask about Ubuntu-specific 
>installation, but I haven't received a reply on the Ubuntu forum so far.
>
>I need to see where postfix is pointing. As I understand it, it's the 
>"mailman" entry in postfix's master.cf that determines this. There I 
>have the entry as specified in the mailman documentation:
>
>mailman   unix  -       n       n       -       -       pipe
>   flags=FR user=list argv=/usr/lib/mailman/bin/postfix-to-mailman.py
>   ${nexthop} ${user}
>
>Per man page for master(5) this is supposed to mean that executabe 
>'mailman' is present relative to the path specified by postfix param 
>queue_directory. The value of that variable (as determined by running 
>postconf queue_directory) is /var/spool/postfix. There is no executable 
>named 'mailman' at that location, so I'm not clear on how postfix is 
>invoking mailman on incoming mail, but that seems to be where the 
>problem lies.


The above master.cf entry defines a 'mailman' transport that pipes mail
to the script at /usr/lib/mailman/bin/postfix-to-mailman.py. Assuming
that is how mail is being delivered to Mailman (you can verify this
from the Postfix log entries), you should be able to see what
installation it is pointing to be just reading it. I don't think I
have ever seen the Debian/Ubuntu version of this (officially
unsupported - how many times have I written that this week?) script,
but the one I have has a configuration setting on the 4th line like

MailmanHome = "/var/mailman"; # Mailman home directory.

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