[cobalt-developers] Mailman pkg Alpha

["CobaltWorld" <cobalt@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

We have released mailman 2.0.8-1 pkg for the SunCobalt RaQ3/4  You can find
it at www.cobaltworld.com in our download section under pkgfactory
Alpha/Beta

I must stress that this is very alpha there is still a lot of CLI stuff to
do but the bare bones are there.

I will release the srpm to anyone willing to assist in the development but I
don't want to have 100 people all trying to impose their ideas we have no
cvs yet so it could end up a nightmare to untangle. Please contact
developers@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx if you are interested in helping.

What does the pkg do

It creates a user and group mailman
It creates a folder /home/mailman and installs mailman there with the
correct permissions and configuration etc.
It updates the aliases file with mailman: postmaster and mailman-owner:
mailman and executes /usr/sbin/newalias
It creates a softlink in /usr/adm/sm.bin of wrapper_mailman to
/home/mailman/mail/wrapper
It adds the Aliases and ScriptAliases required to srm.conf and then restarts
Apache
It copies 4 icons files over to /usr/admserv/icons

What it does not do

It doesn't set a password for mailman you need to SSH in and
/home/mailman/bin/mmsitepass and then enter your chosen password for admin
tasks
It doesn't create a new list you need to /home/mailman/bin/newlist and enter
the detail asked and then you need to manually create the entries for
/etc/mail/aliases and /etc/mail/virtusertble REMEMBERING to hash them
afterwards with /usr/sbin/newalias and

an example of a test list entry in /etc/mail/aliases

## test mailing list
## created: 18-Mar-2002 mailman
test:                    "|/home/mailman/mail/wrapper_mailman post test"
test-admin:              "|/home/mailman/mail/wrapper_mailman mailowner
test"
test-request:            "|/home/mailman/mail/wrapper_mailman mailcmd test"
test-owner:              test-admin

The entries for /etc/mail/aliases are given at the time you create a new
list.  Just remember to change in each one wrapper for wrapper_mailman.

And this is how the entry at the virtusertable looks like (for list test and
domain lists.example.com):

test@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx test
test-admin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx test-admin
test-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx test-request
test-owner@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx test-owner

Now the challenge as you can see there are still a lot of areas that require
SSH and knowledge of your RaQ and areas that a novice could screw up so it
would be real nice to wrapp all this into a UI in php for example - I will
be making a start but I am more of an enabler than a programmer so if anyone
out there wants to help on the UI that would be great.  I have a feeling
Jeff Lasman has already volunteered his documentation skills to useful
projects.  This project would really give something to the RaQ comunity for
people not happy with Majodomo but we need to work as a comunity to achieve
it. Please contact us if you feel you can help

For a lot of this so far i have to thank Francisco Sánchez who very kindly
sent me a step by step of his install allowing me to work through the
install and subsequent spec file a lot quicker than ploughing through the
manual and my local RPM guru Glen Gray at www.Antefacto.com for helping me
sort out the bits that didn't work.