Mailman on Mac OS X Server 10.3.9 Problems

Question

Mailman on Mac OS X Server 10.3.9 Problems

We have a few mailing lists on our old PowerMac G4/Dual 450 machine. We have Mac OS X Server 10.3.9 on there and we are using Mailman for list management.

Mailman is not sending anything through the lists. I repaired permissions via the Apple repair permissions function of Disk Utility and since there is a bug in that process in relation to Mailman I ran the check_perm -f command from Terminal to fix them to what Mailman wants. That usually fixes most of the problems with the Mailman system. Also restarted the qrunner and for a time that fixed it. But that isn't fixing it now.

I know the OS is old and we plan to replace it with a brand new X-Serve with Mac OS X Server 10.5.x. But for now the older server still needs to do its' job.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Ben

MacBook Pro/2.5Ghz, Mac OS X (10.5.1)

Posted on Sep 12, 2008 12:25 PM

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Answer 1

pterobyte

Level 6

11,104 points

Sep 12, 2008 12:40 PM in response to Benjamin Derry

What do the error logs say?
Have you checked:
/var/log/mailman/qrunner
/var/log/mailman/error
/var/log/system.log

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Answer 2

Sep 19, 2008 11:20 AM in response to pterobyte

Yes and they show that the server received the message to the lists but I don't see anything being sent from the lists. I did a test message to one of our lists and got an error message back that said:

Your message

To: helpdesk-users@lists.sandburg.edu
Subject: Helpdesk-users Reminder
Sent: Fri, 12 Sep 2008 10:48:37 -0500

did not reach the following recipient(s):

helpdesk-users@lists.sandburg.edu on Wed, 17 Sep 2008 11:40:31 -0500
The e-mail system was unable to deliver the message, but did not
report a specific reason. Check the address and try again. If it still
fails, contact your system administrator.
< lists.sandburg.edu #4.0.0 X-Postfix; temporary failure. Command
output: couldn't connect to lmtpd: Connection refused_ 421 4.3.0
deliver: couldn't connect to lmtpd_ >

So how do I fix lmtpd?

Thanks,
Ben

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Answer 3

pterobyte

Level 6

11,104 points

Sep 19, 2008 11:38 AM in response to Benjamin Derry

No need to fix lmtpd. Nothing wrong with it. This looks like your mailman aliases file is missing or not read by postfix. Thus, it tries to deliver to a non-existent mail box.

Check if /etc/postfix/main.cf contains a reference to the mailman aliases.
Depending on whether you use local or virtual domains, something like:
alias_maps = hash:/etc/aliases, hash:/var/mailman/data/aliases
virtual aliasmaps = hash:/etc/postfix/virtual,hash:/var/mailman/data/virtual-mailman

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Answer 4

Sep 25, 2008 9:55 AM in response to Benjamin Derry

I ended up making a new Linux VM for this list server. So thanks for the help.

Ben

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