Sympa Mailing List manager

[ElgertS]

PROJECT DESCRIPTION

This project involves installation on Mac OS X Server 10.2 of the Sympa Mailing List Manager.

Sympa is a mail list manager. Its key advantages over Mailman and other mailing list managers are integration with MySQL, an effective archive search function, and use of x.509 certificates for list security.

The lastest release of Sympa is the first capable of being used on Mac OS X. This was accomplished by removing the requirement of the Local::Msgcat perl module specifically to make Sympa compatible with Mac OS X.

[ElgertS]

Step 1: Berkeley DB

Apple ships Mac OS X Server 10.2 with Berkeley DB installed. Unfortunately, the release is not current and it has serious bugs in it. It is necessary to upgrade to the latest release.

http://www.sleepycat.com/update/snapshot/db-4.1.25.tar.gz

[ElgertS]

Step 2: CPAN modules

Sympa relies on a wide variety of CPAN modules. Some of these will already be installed. Many of those not installed will install easily via CPAN. In my installation, I found several that would not install well under CPAN and had to be installed manually. The following is the order I was able to install the CPAN modules along with the methodology required for each:

NET::LDAP – CPAN standard install
CGI – updated within CPAN
Encode – updated within CPAN
Net::FTP – CPAN standard install
Net::LDAP – CPAN standard install
MIME::Tools – CPAN standard install
Crypt::CipherSaber – CPAN standard install
FCGI – CPAN standard install
MIME::Base64 – CPAN standard install
DBI – CPAN standard install
LWP – had to force install within CPAN
DBD::mysql – would not install through CPAN as it tests itself after install using demo user and password against a demo database. This would only work if these settings were valid. Had to download manually and edit the file to have valid authentication and db information. After this change, module installed without a problem.
IO::Socket::SSL – CPAN standard install
Net::SSLeay – CPAN standard install
MHonArc – manually installed
suidperl – I was not able to install this file as I have not yet located its installer. It is required by the web interface. If anyone has ideas on how to install this module I would be extremely interested.

[ElgertS]

Step 3: Create user and group

Sympa needs to have a user and a group, both of which are suggested to be “sympa”. They prefer the user’s home directory be /home/sympa.

[ElgertS]

Step 4: Install Sympa

The installation is a standard Unix compile operation.

http://www.sympa.org/distribution/sympa-3.4.4.1.tar.gz

The instructions suggest you copy the source to the sympa home drectory as such:

/home/sympa/src

unless Stuffit has taken care of it already:

gzip -dc sympa-3.4.4.1.tar.gz | tar xf –

followed by:

$ ./configure
$ make
$ make install

[ElgertS]

Step 5: Create Sympa database in MySQL

Create a database named “sympa” in MySQL. When the Sympa perl script is first launched it will populate this with the appropriate tables.

[ElgertS]

Step 6: Configure startup scripts

The instructions for Sympa suggest altering /etc/rc.local. Mac OS X doesn’t use this so I would imagine a startup item would be most appropriate to launch the following items:

~sympa/bin/sympa.pl
~sympa/bin/archived.pl
~sympa/bin/bounced.pl
~sympa/bin/task_manager.pl

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