Congratulations! You've installed the Mailman software. To get
everything running you need to hook Mailman up to both your web
server and your mail system.
If you plan on running your MTA and web server on different
machines, sharing Mailman installations via NFS, be sure that
the clocks on those two machines are synchronized closely.
You might take a look at the file
Mailman/LockFile.py; the constant
CLOCK_SLOP helps the locking mechanism compensate
for clock skew in this type of environment.
Configure your web server to give $prefix/cgi-bin
permission to run CGI scripts. You probably need to be root
to do this.
The line you should add might look something like one of
the following (with the real absolute directory substituted
for $prefix, of course), depending on your web
server:
Consult your web server's documentation for details.
IMPORTANT: You want to be very sure that the user id
under which your CGI scripts run is not in the
mailman group you created above, otherwise
private archives will be accessible to anyone.
Copy the Mailman, Python, and GNU logos to a location accessible
to your web server. E.g. with Apache, you've usually got an
icons directory that you can drop the images
into. You want to copy
$prefix/icons/mailman.jpg,
$prefix/icons/PythonPowered.png, and
$prefix/icons/gnu-head-tiny.jpg to this
directory.
You then want to add a line to your
$prefix/Mailman/mm_cfg.py file which sets the
base URL for the logos. For example:
IMAGE_LOGOS = '/images/'
The default value for IMAGE_LOGOS is
/icons/. Read the
comment in Defaults.py.in for details.
Configure your web server to point to the Pipermail public
mailing list archives:
For example, in Apache:
Alias /pipermail/ $varprefix/archives/public/
where $varprefix is usually
$prefix unless you've used the
--with-var-prefix option to configure.
Consult your web server's documentation for details. Also
be sure to configure your web server to follow symbolic links
in this directory, otherwise public Pipermail archives won't
be accessible. For Apache users, consult the
FollowSymLinks option.
Now restart your web server.
IMPERATIVE! IMPORTANT! DO THIS! YOU'LL BE SORRY IF
YOU DON'T!
Set up the crontab entries. Mailman runs a number of cron
jobs for its basic functionality. You need to be user
mailman (or whatever you specified as
--with-ownername) to perform this step. Add
$prefix/cron/crontab.in as a crontab entry by
executing these commands:
% su - mailman
% cd $prefix/cron
% crontab crontab.in
Look to see if there is special instructions about hooking your
MTA up to Mailman. If so, there will be a
README.yourMTA file in the Mailman source directory.
Add aliases for mailman and
mailman-owner to the system's mail alias
database. These aliases should point to whoever is ultimately
responsible for the Mailman installation. Here are
instructions for those running Sendmail:
su to root.
Assuming your email is fred@flintstone.com,
add the following lines to the file
/etc/aliases:
