I'm trying to set up Mailman on our gnome-ev.de server, so we can have some mailing lists. It's not quite working though.

I installed mailman with yast. It's meant to use the web cgi stuff from /usr/lib/mailman/cgi-bin automatically, but suexec doesn't allow that, leaving a message in /etc/apache2/suexec.log saying "command not in docroot".

So I copied the cgi files to our html directory instead. I had to change their ownership because they seem to be run as our web10 user instead of the mailman or nobody user. Furthermore, mailman likes to know what user it is running as and complains when run as a different user. Changing /etc/sysconfig/mailman should be enough, but only hacking the GID directly into mailmain.cgi-gid seemed to work for me. So now the "WANTED gid 66534 GOT gid 102" web page error is gone.

However, every time we use the mailman cgi pages to change a mailing list it rewrites the files as owned by mailman, making it impossible for the mailman cgi to use them again. So somehow it's running the cgi as web10 while also running them as mailman, or giving file ownership to mailman.

In summary, SUSE is a pain, as usual. Stuff really should just work.

Once again, if you know of any reasonably priced hosters in Germany please do leave a comment. I don't want to maintain a server (I don't want to be a sysadmin) and I don't really want to pay the huge dedicated-server prices.