mystery mailman problem solved

[Anonymous]

Hi – just posting this in case anyone else is having the same problem as I have been. When I tried to start the mailing list through server admin, the program would ask me to set up the administrators for the initial “mailman” list as it should, but when I tried to save the information it would disappear from the GUI. the log files had this message :

Jun 02 18:21:12 2005 (17025) Site list is missing: mailman
Jun 02 18:25:35 2005 mailmanctl(17182): PID unreadable in: /private/var/mailman/data/master-qrunner.pid
Jun 02 18:25:35 2005 mailmanctl(17182): [Errno 2] No such file or directory: ‘/private/var/mailman/data/master-qrunner.pid’
Jun 02 18:25:35 2005 mailmanctl(17182): Is qrunner even running?

After checking around I discovered that mailman needs an initial list called “mailman” to start up – this wasn’t being created. I ran
sudo /usr/share/mailman/bin/check_perms -f
as specified here, and there did indeed appear to be a lot of permissions issues, but this didn’t fix the problem (though it’s probably a good idea anyway).

Trying to use /usr/share/mailman/bin/newlist to create a list manually resulted in the program reporting that the list name was illegal. This is why the GUI wouldn’t work. The problem was that when you initially configure the server it sets up some configuration files for mailman with your servers domain name. If you didn’t enter the domain name properly when first configuring the server, then these config files won’t be set up right. If they don’t have a legal domain name then newlist will refuse to create a list.

The answer is to edit /usr/share/mailman/Mailman/mm_cfg.py (and possible also /usr/share/mailman/Mailman/Defaults.py though i think mm_cfg.py overrides this file) and set your servers’ domain up properly in DEFAULT_EMAIL_HOST and DEFAULT_URL_HOST.

Once you’ve done this everything should work fine (it did for me anyway)

[Anonymous]

once i got the basic functionality up and running, I found that none of my mailing lists were showing up on the “mailman/listinfo” page where they should show up when advertised. The problem was that my server runs under several domains, and “virtual hosts” is turned on by defaulr in mailman, which means that by default only mailing lists which have their “prefered domain” set to be the same as the domain used in the web browser to view the lists will show up. If, like me, you want all the mailing lists served from your server to show up on this page you can change the setting in Defaults.py

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