Mailman Infrastructure SOP

File:Infrastructure InfrastructureTeamN1.png

Provides mailing list services for Fedora Hosted projects (hosted1) or the Fedora Project (collab1).

Contact Information

Owner: Fedora Infrastructure Team

Contact: #fedora-admin, sysadmin-main, sysadmin-tools, sysadmin-hosted group

Location: ?

Servers: hosted1, collab1

Purpose: Provides mailing list services.

Description

Mailing list services for Fedora Hosted projects are located on the hosted1.fedoraproject.org server. Fedora Project mailing lists are on collab1.

Common Tasks

Creating a new mailing list

1. Log into hosted1 or collab1 1. sudo /usr/local/bin/fedora-mailing-list-setup

[you@hosted1 ~] $ sudo /usr/local/bin/fedora-mailing-list-setup
Password:
Project name: project
List name: project-devel 
Admin username: username # This is the admin user for the list.
FAS Username: yourfasusername # This is the admin adding the lists username
FAS Password:                                 # This is the fas password for the admin user adding the list.
[you@hosted1 ~] $

Note that list names should make sense, and not contain the words 'fedora' or 'list' - the fact that it has to do with Fedora and that it's a list are both obvious from the domain of the email address.

List Administration

The mailman site password for hosted1 or collab1 can be found it /root/mm_sitepass

sudo cat /root/mm_sitepass

The site password can be used to reset lists admin passwords if required. Note: If you change the site password, please update this file.

ML password reset

When a user has requested their mailman password be reset go to the mailing list admin interface at:

https://fedorahosted.org/mailman/admin/<MailingListName>

Use the site-admin password (see above) to log in, set the password to something. Then email the list admin the new password as well as asking them to change it.

Restart Procedure

If the server needs to be restarted mailman should come back on it's own. Otherwise each service on it can be restarted:

sudo service mailman restart
sudo service postfix restart

How to delete a mailing list

Delete a list, but keep the archives

sudo /usr/lib/mailman/bin/rmlist <listname>

Delete a list and its archives

sudo /usr/lib/mailman/bin/rmlist -a <listname>

Mailman migration

This page is a draft only
It is still under construction and content may change. Do not rely on the information on this page.

This is a place where instructions for migrating lists from redhat.com to lists.fp.o will be kept.

Things required from Red Hat:

• The list config (whatever the equivalent of /var/lib/mailman/lists/<listname> is)
• The list archives, in mbox form (/var/lib/mailman/archives/private/<listname>.mbox)

Put these items into their respective places on collab1.

If required at this point, change the list name as follows:

• Rename the archive and list directories to the new names
• Create a file called <newlist-name>.config and put the following in it:

real_name = '<new list name>'

• Don't do anything with that file until the next step :)

For all lists, do the following:

• In the <newlist-name>.config file created earlier, add the following line (create the file if you didn't need to rename the list):

acceptable_aliases = [ 'old-list-name@redhat.com' ]

.

• Verify the sanity of your new configuration via '/usr/lib/mailman/bin/config_list -i <new-list-name>.config -c <new-list-name>
• If that checks out, eliminate the -c from the previous command in order to make your changes.
• generate aliases for the new list /usr/lib/mailman/bin/genaliases
• change the url for the list /usr/lib/mailman/bin/withlist -l -r fix_url <new-list-name> -u admin.fedoraproject.org
• Rebuild the archives using '/usr/lib/mailman/bin/arch --wipe <new-list-name>'
• restore selinux contexts restorecon -rv /var/lib/mailman/lists /var/lib/mailman/archives/private

Additional steps

• rebuilding the archives means all links to the historical mailing lists posts will be broken. Can we get Red Hat to add http redirects from www.redhat.com/archives/<old-list-name> to the lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/<new-list-name> ?
• we'll need Red Hat to set up forwarding aliases for <old-list-name> to <new-list-name>
• fix the names of list that do not make any sense (e.g. feodra-extras-steering) in the current environment. relevant