Jim Plumb

(This is a reminder for next lifetime when I have to come back and do the same thing.)

So I’ve been gradually doing a Linux server install in my office. It’s Mepis 7 and for a mail transport I decided to use Postfix as it seemed to be the least complicated to set up and maintain. I also wanted something that would work well with Mailman, the open source mailing list software. Over the past month through various fits and starts I finally appeared to get Postfix running. To make things simple, Postfix is the program that communicates with other email servers and delivers and receives the mail. Other popular choices are Sendmail and Exim. I’m a relative newby when it comes to this. I use the Synaptic package manager to download and install these software packages. I also use Webmin and a great GUI system management tool. Some of the packages I installed, I did through Webmin and not Synaptic or by using the apt-get method.

I did have a problem using Webmin to install the Postfix package as it went into some kind of infinite loop upon install. I had to clean up the install and ended up installing Postfix via apt-get. Getting Postfix to work wasn’t too hard after that. Had a problem with some permissions on one user account but that’s about it.

I installed Mailman once I felt I got all the bugs worked out with postfix (i.e. I could send and receive email!). When it failed, it came down to going through the logs, googling the error messages and then hacking the configs until it worked.

Here are some of the issues I came up against trying to get Mailman to work with postfix.

1) One thing suggested after mailman is installed is to run /var/lib/mailman/bin/check_perms to make sure all permissions are correct and fixing any by running check_perms -f. I couldn’t get the symbolic link group permissions correct with this (and don’t know if it would have made a difference had I left them), but changed them by hand by using the chgrp -h command.

2) Mailman has a built-in web-based GUI but I couldn’t get it to work. The link is usually http://www.domain.com/cgi-bin/mailman/admin/ where you can start to create your mailing lists. I was getting page not found errors until I went through some mailman tutorials and I found that I hadn’t set up mailman as an Apache2 mod. Found some easy-to-understand instructions at http://www.tectonic.co.za/wordpress/?p=537 and http://wiki.kartbuilding.net/index.php/Mailman.

3) Creating a mailman list and getting the message:
Error: Unknown virtual host: domain.com

Resolved:

add_virtualhost('www.example.com','smtp.example.com')

in mm_cfg.py