[wplug-bsd] Multiple Installs of Mailman for virtual hosts

[Michael Mulich]

-
I recently successfully installed Mailman, but let me go through what I did.  The 500-Internernal Server Error showed up as 'Premature end of script headers' in the error log file.  I tinkered around a bit to figure out if cgi in general was working, which it was.  Something led me to the conclusion that my apache configuration was wrong.  I had it configured as a 'ScriptAlias' under my virtual host for a specific domain.  I believe Mailman was running under the wrong gid...  I removed my changes and setup another virtual host section for listsrv.dom.ain including the 'ScriptAlias' and 'Alias' directives for mailman.  Did a fresh install with the following input.
[input]
make MM_DIR=mailman-dom.ain install clean
[/input]
I followed the rest of the installation guide and now it works.
Notice that my make no longer include the CONFIGURE_ARGS variable, this is because it doesn't work (came to this conclusion by using the -V option to see the value of CONFIGURE_ARGS).  The Makefile does not allow concatenation to CONFIGURE_ARGS, because of the use of '=' and not '+='.  I would consider this an inconvenience since it still works, just not with the options I specify.  I ended up editing the mm_cfg.py file to get my settings correct.  
In conclusion I think the Makefile needs edited to allow these options.  I wanted to make an attempt at editing it, but I do not know what to do after its been edited...  I imagine I send a diff to someone at FreeBSD???  Then again, this is only my third or fourth time using the ports system; so I may not be highly qualified to make changes.  Let me know what you think and if you know what I should do next.
Thank You.

-Michael Mulich
>>> Tom Rhodes <trhodes at FreeBSD.org> 03/05/07 9:10 PM >>>
On Sat, 03 Mar 2007 11:51:50 -0500
"Michael Mulich" <mrmst13 at mail.rmu.edu> wrote:

> Hello-
> This is a fairly simple question I believe...  I'm doing multiple installs of Mailman on FreeBSD-4.7.  It is recommended by the documentation and list users that when doing virtual hosting each host have a separate install.  However I have not got past installing one instance successfully yet.  Currently I am wrestling with a 500-Internal Server Error when trying to access the Mailman web interface.  
> I am pretty sure what I have to do is set the gid for the cgi user, which I attempted to do but it seems that it didn't take.  The following is what i used to install.  
> [input]
> make PREFIX=/usr/local MM_DIR=mailman-fbrpgh.org CGI_GID=vusers CONFIGURE_ARGS+= \
> --with-urlhost=fbrpgh.org \
> --with-mailhost=fbrpgh.org \
> install clean  
> [/input]
> This is my latest command entry, I have also tried using double-quotes around the CONFIGURE_ARGS value, but it wouldn't take either.  There must be something syntactically I am missing because I am fairly sure the arguments are correct.  It doesn't seem like the CGI_GID variable worked either.  I believe it stuck as the default: www.  Also, I know the arguments did not go through because post-install I look at <prefix>/Mailman/Defaults.py and found different different values than what I specified for DEFAULT_EMAIL_HOST and DEFAULT_URL_HOST.  Not a big deal because I know I can change them in mm_cfg.py, but I would still like to know the problem for future reference and other installs.  
> Any thoughts on what I'm doing wrong?  Or recommendations?

What do the apache logs tell you?  A 500 error is usually a
script error of some type and sometimes the logs can explain
further what the issue is.

-- 
Tom Rhodes