[Mailman-Users] Nightly Messages Show Problems

[Mark Sapiro]

On 07/04/2015 06:36 AM, Steve Matzura wrote:
> I guess things are getting better with my new mailman implementation,
> as I received nine messages overnight I've never gotten before. four
> are Errno 13 permission denied, five only contain one line:
> 
> /bin/sh: mailman: command not found
> 
> The subject fields of these five all begin with the same text telling
> me they're from Mailman at my node, etc. The rest of the subject field
> for each message was this:
> 
> /usr/lib/mailman/cron/cull_bad_shunt
> /usr/lib/mailman/cron/checkdbs
> /usr/lib/mailman/cron/disabled
> /usr/lib/mailman/cron/senddigests
> /usr/lib/mailman/cron/nightly_gzip


These occur because you have installed a crontab which has been
formatted as a system crontab and intended to be installed in a place
like /etc/cron.d/mailman as a user contab somewhere in /var/spool/cron.

System crontabs have an extra field between the days/times and the
command which is the user to run as. In this case, that user (mailman)
is interpreted as part of the command because the crontab is installed
for a user.


> Here are the four Errno13 messages:
> 
> Subject: Cron <mailman@{mynode}> /usr/lib/mailman/cron/nightly_gzip
> From: "(Cron Daemon)" <mailman@{mydomain.com}>
> Date: Sat,  4 Jul 2015 03:27:02 +0000 (UTC)
> 
> Traceback (most recent call last):
>   File "/usr/lib/mailman/cron/nightly_gzip", line 158, in <module>
>     main()
>   File "/usr/lib/mailman/cron/nightly_gzip", line 114, in main
>     mlist = MailList.MailList(name, lock=0)
>   File "/usr/lib/mailman/Mailman/MailList.py", line 130, in __init__
>     self.Load()
>   File "/usr/lib/mailman/Mailman/MailList.py", line 655, in Load
>     dict, e = self.__load(file)
>   File "/usr/lib/mailman/Mailman/MailList.py", line 620, in __load
>     fp = open(dbfile)
> IOError: [Errno 13] Permission denied:
> '/var/lib/mailman/lists/mailman/config.pck'
...


> Thinking a run of check_perms might help, I did so and got (then
> fixed) this one error, which I reran with -f to fix:
> 
> /usr/lib/mailman/Mailman/mm_cfg.pyc bad group (has: root, expected
> mailman) (fixing)


The four are all permissions issues. Since check_perms thinks the
permissions are OK, the issue could be that the user as which the crons
are running is not in the 'mailman' group, or it could be a SELinux or
other policy manager issue.


> Not wanting to overload the list with diagnostics, hope this is
> sufficient to start. More info on request of course.


It seems there are at least two mailman crontabs. One is a user crontab
in /var/spool/cron/mailman (or maybe /var/spool/cron/crontabs/mailman or
??) that is not formatted as a user crontab and is responsible for the
/bin/sh: mailman: command not found messages. The other is probably in
/etc/cron.d/mailman and is the one giving the permission exceptions.

What are the contents of these crontabs? You only want one of these.
Which may be important if there are SELinux issues, but otherwise, it
doesn't matter as long as the one is correct.

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