[Letux-kernel] mailman list outage

[H. Nikolaus Schaller]

Hi,
you may have noticed, that there was a server problem which did
return all messages sent to this list with some message about
a server misconfiguration.

The reason was that I had installed some very unrelated
package on the server which apparently did install a new
version of python. After a reboot of the server, mailman
was broken because there was some problem in the mysql
server which could not upgrade and the config after
upgrade was incomplete.

To solve this I had to reinstall mysql - and upgrade to
a newer version (the older isn't supported any more).
Then I upgraded mailman to the latest one because it
reported a too old libssl.

For some still not completely understood reasons this
new install changed the group ownership of the alias
database file that is shared between postfix and mailman.

The result was that postfix tried to pipe received mails
into a mailman wrapper tool which should store and forward
the mail. But that wrapper tool checks if it is called
with the correct group name. This was no longer the case
in the new installation and I didn't find a way for
postfix to set it correctly. Documentations says that
it is copied from the aliases.db file, but it doesn't
appear to be the cade.

Finally, I did a manual install of mailman with the
proper --with-mail-gid= configure option so that the
wrapper script no longer complains and it appears to
work. Until the next upgrade :)

BR and sorry for any inconveniences,
Nikolaus