[Mailman-Users] permission for archives

[Mark Sapiro]

On 06/16/2015 02:17 AM, Lucio Chiappetti wrote:
> I am running a few mailing lists with private archive on my machine.
> I see that /var/lib/mailman/archives/private/ contains two directories
> per list one named "listname" and the other one "listname.mbox".
> 
> Owned by wwwrun.mailman, permissions drwxrwsr-x


This is good. owner doesn't actually mattetr for these. It is the
'mailman' group that is important.


> The listname directory contains one index.html owned by wwwrun.mailman
> while all other directories and text files are owned by mailman.mailman.


That's OK, but they all should be world readable/searchable.


> The listname.mbox directory contains a single file with the same name.
> 
> Now I noticed that at present such file is owned by me (lucio.staff)
> with permissions -rw-rw-r--


Again OK as long as its group is mailman.


> And I see in the log files some error messages like
> 
> Jun 16 07:02:26 2015 (3112) Uncaught runner exception: [Errno 13]
> Permission denied:
> '/var/lib/mailman/archives/private/fitsconv.mbox/fitsconv.mbox'


This will not occur if the file is writable by the 'mailman' group.


> I suspect this may be due to the fact a while ago I created some soft
> links from my own ~/.mail directory e.g. fitsconv.mbox ->
> /var/lib/mailman/archives/private/fitsconv.mbox/fitsconv.mbox
> (the links are owned by me and have lrwxrwxrwx)


Additional symlinks to the file are irrelevant unless you are writing to
it (you shouldn't be) and changing its group.


> The idea was that I could, as administrator, access the entire sequence
> of messages of a list from my mail client (alpine), instead than with
> the web interface. Of course I'd just need read access, not write.
> 
> 1) which are the correct permissions ?


See above. Also, see Mailman's bin/check_perms.


> 2) apparently since the wrong permission were setup, archiving stopped to
>    work. Is there a way to rebuild the archives from messages stored in
>    personal folders (I am not sure I have all of them though !)


Just fix the permissions and run Mailman's bin/unshunt which will
requeue the shunted messages for the archiver (it won't resend them to
the list).

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