I decided it would be nice to run the Mailman mailing list manager,
but I'm having some problems. I am working mostly from tarballs
because it seems to be more fun. My Apache 1.3.14 is from whatever
package was current when I set up the server a month or so back. I
compiled sendmail 8.11.2 and have that working along with procmail and
smrsh. 

I downloaded Python 2.0 and whatever the latest production version of
mailman was. There was one BSD note in the Mailman documentation. I
don't know if what I'm expericencing is weak documentation, a BSD
oddity, or a Mac port oddity. I know I managed to get quite confused
by the fact that TCP wrappers are built into the kernel or at least
the distribution and I suspect something similar may be hapenning
here.

The notes for BSD, that's BSD in general not necessarily NetBSD, said
that on BSD systems all directories would behave as though they had
the sgid bid turned on in Linux (and presumably other AT&T descendent)
UNIX systems. And gave instructions on how to change the makefile to
avoid this.

Since the reason given for this was to prevent the reporting of sgid
files in the daily file system checks, I thought I would ignore
it. But I seem to have endless problems. I can't tell if they are
related. What happens it that there is a cgi component of program
running as user nobody - and a mail component running as user
guest. There is a user mailman and a group mailman. What happens is
that the programs when run through the mail interface have a problems
getting at the files created with the web interface. Event though the
group (mailman) has read-write access. 

Is the problem my lack of understanding of BSD file systems? Has
anyone compiled Mailman on a mac68k NetBSD system? Is there an easy
way to test and change group memberships with a given program? I can
use sudo with the -u option to issue commands as a given user; how can
I temporarily be effectively a member of a group in order to check out
this group permission governed program.



-- 
Josh Kuperman
josh@ssimr.com
http://www.ssimr.com