Mailman mailing list management users

Thomas Andrews | 1 Dec 2009 10:37

web interface permissions ?

Hi,

On a newly installed mailman setup, the "Submit All Data" button has no 
effect in the page "Tend to pending moderator requests". It doesn't 
matter if I select 'Accept' 'Reject' or 'Discard', the effect is the 
same - nothing.

On other admin pages I can do anything I want - add users, change 
defaults, etc, etc...

I'm wondering if this is a permissions issue?

I've checked /var/log/apache/* and /var/log/mailman/* plus the usual 
syslog files for errors, and I can't see anything obviously wrong.

This is pretty much a standard debian install with two lists: one 
'mailman' list and another.

I'm using mailman with Exim and had to make some small changes as 
suggested in the docs to get it to work, and the SMTP side of it seems 
to be perfectly fine - I just can't do things like discarding messages 
from non-members.

dpkg -l mailman gives me this:

ii  mailman  1:2.1.12-3     Powerful, web-based mailing list manager

Running "check_perms" gives me lots of permissions errors, but it was 
like that before I touched any of the config files, so I'm wondering if 
anyone else has had to fix this problem to get the mailman deb to work

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Mark Sapiro | 1 Dec 2009 17:21

Re: web interface permissions ?

Thomas Andrews wrote:
>
>On a newly installed mailman setup, the "Submit All Data" button has no 
>effect in the page "Tend to pending moderator requests". It doesn't 
>matter if I select 'Accept' 'Reject' or 'Discard', the effect is the 
>same - nothing.
>
>On other admin pages I can do anything I want - add users, change 
>defaults, etc, etc...
>
>I'm wondering if this is a permissions issue?

Possibly, but not too likely.

>I've checked /var/log/apache/* and /var/log/mailman/* plus the usual 
>syslog files for errors, and I can't see anything obviously wrong.
>
>This is pretty much a standard debian install with two lists: one 
>'mailman' list and another.
>
>I'm using mailman with Exim and had to make some small changes as 
>suggested in the docs to get it to work, and the SMTP side of it seems 
>to be perfectly fine - I just can't do things like discarding messages 
>from non-members.
>
>dpkg -l mailman gives me this:
>
>ii  mailman  1:2.1.12-3     Powerful, web-based mailing list manager
>
>Running "check_perms" gives me lots of permissions errors, but it was

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Adam McGreggor | 1 Dec 2009 17:37

Re: web interface permissions ?

On Tue, Dec 01, 2009 at 08:21:27AM -0800, Mark Sapiro wrote:
> You should run 'check_perms -f' as root until the problems are fixed,
> but there is one caveat. I think the Debian package installs a number
> of symlinks and check_perms doesn't do well with symlinks. It checks
> the ownership and mode of the symlink itself and finds a problem. It
> then tries to fix the problem, but this fixes the target, not the
> symlink. So, it will continue to report problems with the permissions
> of the symlink even though there are really no problems.

It does. I keep meaning to write a patch to fix that, as it annoys me
quite a lot.

The symlinks are part of making the package adhere to Debian Policy,
istr.

One of the PPA packagers is onlist (although maybe the dev list), ISTR. 

--

-- 
``What the bloody hell is the point of 24-hour rolling news
  if it doesn't carry terrifying-lizard-related news?''
  (Anthony Wells, on learning from the web that `a giant
  lizard is terrorising Beirut')

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Thomas Andrews | 1 Dec 2009 20:46

Re: web interface permissions ?

Mark Sapiro wrote:

> Thomas Andrews wrote:
>> On a newly installed mailman setup, the "Submit All Data" button has no 
>> effect in the page "Tend to pending moderator requests". It doesn't 
>> matter if I select 'Accept' 'Reject' or 'Discard', the effect is the 
>> same - nothing.

> What happens when you click the "Submit All Data" button? does it
> reload the same page or what?

Yes, it was

> If you look at the page source, what is the action url in the form tag?
> Is it correct? Is it something that the web server redirects? Is it
> the same as that on the admin pages except for 'admindb' instead of
> 'admin'?

This gave me the solution. The action url was referring to http://... 
but I had apache configured to redirect http to https using

     Redirect 301 / https://bla

Mailman of course didn't know this so it didn't use https://

First I fixed it by turning off the Redirect, and then I re-enabled 
Redirect and changed mm_cfg.py's setting of DEFAULT_URL_PATTERN. I had 
to run this command for it to take effect:

    /usr/lib/mailman/bin/withlist -l -r fix_url

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