July 2006 – Stay N Alive

Fedora and Mailman Issues

I decided to get this on here so it gets index by the engines and others can find it if they run into the same thing. Hopefully it’s useful for someone.

If you run into a problem where the web interface/ui for mailman just returns a bunch of jibberish and appears to just be returning the text content of the binary cgi’s in the mailman cgi-bin, it probably means you aren’t loading mod_cgi. Turns out Fedora needs mod_cgi loaded for those to be treated as cgis.

After that, alter the permissions on your /var/log/mailman/error file to allow more write access (you’ll notice odd errors in your httpd error logs if you don’t). After that, just follow the errors in /var/log/mailman/error – you’ll see permissions errors, of which you’ll need to ensure you set permissions on all the files it errors out on. Setting the sticky bit on your lists, /etc/mailman, and a couple other places may prove useful, and keep some of those errors from coming back when you add lists in the future. Voila – working Mailman!