Topic: Has anyone had any success getting Mailman to work on SME 7.5.1

[ricks1950]

I installed the package following the write up in the wiki, and the expected things did not happen.  The service starts, but there is no panel in the admin interface, and the cgi-bin web pages to manage group membership do not work.

I started a bug in Bigzilla, and got the response that this is "Not a core package"

If anyone has the secret sauce to make this work in SME, I would appreciate it.  I have it running on a Ubuntu server installation, and really thought that this would be what is needed for the group using SME.  There are enough differences in environment, but I have tried pretty much everything I have learned on the other server, and am getting confused.

[janet]

ricks1950

The wiki does speak of these problems you are having. The contrib appears to be broken for SME>7.3
see http://wiki.contribs.org/Mailman

I started a bug in Bigzilla, and got the response that this is "Not a core package"

See bug 6430
Maybe Shad answered that way as there will be no immediate dev input to the problem as it is a contrib, rather than a core package. Nonetheless it is still a bug with the contrib, and the maintainer would normally be the one to step up and resolve it. Failing that others who have the skills would need to look at the problem. If no one looks into it, then it will not get fixed.

Perhaps you can download the SME 7.3 or earlier iso and get mailman working, and then look at what breaks when you do an upgrade. It may help you to find what is wrong.

Alternatively take a look at the Mailman site,
http://www.gnu.org/software/mailman/index.html
to see if similar problems have been reported, perhaps there is already a known fix.
Otherwise you can remove the rpm contrib, and then install following guidelines on the mailman site, and get it working that way.

You really need to tell us what you tried (in detail), rather than saying you tried everything (of which we have no knowledge).

[ricks1950]

In simple terms, on the Ubuntu server there is an alias set up in the apache2.conf file that points the url cgi-bin to /usr/lib/mailman/cgi-bin ie. http://www.2ht.ca/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/2htmembers and this works on the Ubuntu server. (2ht is the non-profit group wanting the mailing list)

Ubuntu 10.10 64 bit server is different enough, with a later version of apache, to make me wary of syntax -- it looks the same but I have not been able to confirm.

In SME the httpd.conf has a big flag on it with a warning to not modify the file.  I'm guessing there is a way to do a custom template for this file, but this is an in-service machine, and I am a little reluctant to just screw around until it works.  I did try a link in the http ibay of the website, but this appears to be illegal.

The other pointer in bug 6430 indicates that Mailman is attempting to run as user apache rather than user www my next step could certainly be a recompiled Mailman with the appropriate flags set, but I think that the httpd.conf has to be configured correctly.

Any expert guidance would be appreciated.

[janet]

ricks1950

I installed the package following the write up in the wiki, and the expected things did not happen.  The service starts, but there is no panel in the admin interface, and the cgi-bin web pages to manage group membership do not work.

Well I justed installed the mailman contrib as per wiki article onto a lightly modified SME 7.5.1 (fully updated), and it installs OK for me. I can access the management  interface & see a panel in server manager.

So the possibilities are that you have a heavily modified server which has something installed that is incompatible with mailman, or you are using SME8betaX (and not 7.5.1 as this is a SME7.x forum), or maybe the download files were corrupted as you did the yum install.
I made no system changes etc, just installed using yum, did the post-upgrade & reboot, then was able to access the management web page.

This is the first time I used mailman, so it seems to have installed OK, and I was able to subscribe to the list and send and receive email messages, so it appears to be working.

Perhaps you should setup a test server (7.5.1 fully updated) and try installing it, and go from there.

It works for me, so there is something not right at your end.

I would stop trying to do on SME server whatever you did on Ubuntu (to get mailman working), as it is not necessary and is only misleading you.

[ricks1950]

The server is not heavily modified; it has been in continuous service as an SME server since 2003, upgraded along the way, last clean install was 2003.

I did identify that the required template fragment,

ScriptAlias /mailman/ /usr/lib/mailman/cgi-bin/
<Directory /usr/lib/mailman/cgi-bin/>
    AllowOverride None
    Options ExecCGI
    Order allow,deny
    Allow from all
</Directory>


Alias /pipermail/ /var/lib/mailman/archives/public/
<Directory /var/lib/mailman/archives/public>
    Options Indexes MultiViews FollowSymLinks
    AllowOverride None
    Order allow,deny
    Allow from all
</Directory>

did not get placed anywhere where it would work, so the panel in server-admin and the web interface had no chance to start.  When I got this working, I got the following error:

The Mailman CGI wrapper encountered a fatal error. This entry is being stored in your syslog:

Group mismatch error. Mailman expected the CGI wrapper script to be
executed as one of the following groups:
[apache],
but the system's web server executed the CGI script as group: "www".
Try tweaking the web server to run the script as one of these groups:
[apache],
or re-run configure providing the command line option:
'--with-cgi-gid=www'.

I installed from yum as well, so while it worked for you, it did not work for me, and these are the reasons. 

[Stefano]

how did you install it? please report exactly the command, thank you

did you enable different repos?

[ricks1950]

I installed from the Software Installer panel, after allowing Manage Individual Packages -- pretty much as I have always done, from the days back in Mitel.  When Mary indicated she was successful, I guessed I might have some out dated repositories called in yum ... It's the middle of the night here, I will look again in the morning to see if I can update this.

I do most of my work with Debian and its derivatives; the SME boxes are really solid and trouble free, but sometimes I feel that I am in a strange land working on them. 

If you have a shortcut to the answer, I would appreciate it.

[Stefano]

ok

login as root (locally or via ssh) then

Code: [Select]

rpm -e mailman smeserver-mailman
yum --enablerepo=smecontribs install smeserver-mailman

this should work

[janet]

ricks1950, Stefano

login as root (locally or via ssh) then

Code: [Select]

rpm -e mailman smeserver-mailman
yum --enablerepo=smecontribs install smeserver-mailman


Followed by
signal-event post-upgrade; signal-event reboot

[Stefano]

Thank you Mary for the clarification

[ricks1950]

Stefano, Mary, many thanks.  Mailman is working, and I am going about the business of configuring it for the users now.

For the historical record, I was a Mitel employee when e-smith was brought in, and I worked with Dan York to integrate the training and documentation into the corporate, drone mentality.  This is my enduring shame.

So happy that the distribution lives on.

[janet]

ricks1950

Dan York made an appearance here recently, it may have been in the bugzilla, can't remember exactly.

[brianr]

For anyone's info (slightly off topic), i have had success with ezmlm on V8b6 if anyone is looking for mailing list software for V8.

As long as you select the V7 contribs repo, then it seems to  work fine AFAICT

http://wiki.contribs.org/Ezmlm