Mailman

• mailman web interface works
• mailman aliases were uncommented and newaliases was run - (and postfix restarted)
• mailman does not accept posts to lists
• don't know why not
  • sample log message:

Jun  8 01:18:11 localhost postfix/smtpd[[:24659]]: NOQUEUE: reject:
RCPT from cod.sandelman.ca[[:192.139.46.42]]: 450 <sysadmin@oclug.on.ca>:
Recipient address rejected: User unknown in local recipient table;
from=<ian@excess.org> to=<sysadmin@oclug.on.ca> proto=ESMTP
helo=<cod.sandelman.ca>

• the sysadmin list seems to have disappeared out of /etc/aliases.
  • I put it back - maybe it was added to old tux after we copied the /etc/aliases file over.
  • let's see if sysadmin starts working
• also fixed /etc/resolv.conf - now sender addresses resolve.

• mailman handles email and can be controlled by web
• has web interface for configuring
• some config info and the message data is in /var/lib/mailman, often in “pickle” files (.pck; its a python thing), including “site admin password”.
• stores messages in it's own queues until it hands them off to the MTA
• has a daemon that processes the mailman queues: mailmanctl
  • /etc/init.d/mailman
• more config in /etc/mailman
• and in /etc/apache/conf.d/mailman
• /etc/mailman/mm_cfg.py and /usr/lib/mailman/Mailman/Defaults.py

• new tux shows “no public lists” after /var/lib/mailman has been copied over … why? Maybe because the files were copied while mailmanctl was live?
• maybe because hostname is not “tux”? see Defaults.py, VIRTUAL_HOST_OVERVIEW

• stop mailman from processing queues:
  • /etc/init.d/mailman stop
• copy mailman info from old tux to new tux with tar
  • /var/lib/mailman
• start mailman again:
  • /etc/init.d/mailman start
• do pickle files need special handling, like binary database files?
  • No. They are plain-text serializations of python objects.

• in /etc/apache/conf.d/mailman

• check logs which go to $prefix/logs/error → actually this is empty, where do our logs go?
• probably should clean out /var/lib/mailman/data once in a while
  • it's full of stale pickles

• http://mail.python.org/pipermail/mailman-users/2007-January/055211.html