On 20 Oct 2004, at 17:04, Mauricio Tavares wrote:
John Wheaton wrote:
Hello,
I am curious whether Mailman will work on Solaris, and how best to integrate it with our current web site. Our school maintains an informational website at www.stfrancishighschool.com, hosted by IgLou in Louisville. We have been discussing with a few alumni the possibility of creating mailing lists for the alums, and Mailman seems like a good solution. We have also looked into Majordomo, which IgLou will administer for additional monthly charges. We would like to save money.
Can Mailman be installed alongside our website? In other words, is it self contained? Can its bin and lib files, for example, be installed in our web directory, and still allow Mailman to function?
What you are asking is exactly what I am planning on doing here. We have a mail server (Solaris 8 box) which is currently being used as mailman's website. What we are going to do is to NFS mount the mailman directory in our webserver (a Solaris 9 box) so it can be accessed there. Probably, the best way to do it is kinda like what you infered: install mailman in the webserver and then automount the data directories. I'll be playing with that and keep you all posted with my adventures.
If it helps, I have been running Mailman on Linux from NFS mounts, with the actual storage on a high-reliability UNIX server, for over 3 years now. In my case it was to provide a more reliable service; I use a primary Mailman server and a warm standby secondary server which takes over the primary server's identity via some DHCP trickery if the primary fails. Worked well a week back when the the local SCSI drive on the primary server died. Switchover in a couple of minutes, no loss of service or data or access to data (mail and archives). Second time that drive failure has happened; once on each of the two machines.
I have been warned by experts that NFS locking could be a problem with this way of working but thus far it has not proven to be a problem.
I would like to achieve automatic failover and being able to load share would be great but that is a more serious challenge for a Mailman configuration and would test the NFS lock issues more strenuously.
The only problems I have had with Linux and NFS is due to what I believe to be a kernel lock handling problem on Linux. The only solution I found for this was to limit the transfer size used for the NFS mounts to 8k. I concluded that left to their own devices (no pun intended) the Linux NFS client negotiated too large a transfer size with the NFS server and then tripped over its own feet by releasing some internal kernel lock prematurely, which then caused a process to hang indefinitely (and also be unkillable; reboot being the only way to dispose of them) if they performed large data transfer to/from NFS mounts.
As an aside I am about to move these Mailmen from Linux on x86 to Solaris on Sparc having had no bad experience with another Solaris/Sparc installation I set up for another domain.
Our other possible solution is to host the mailing lists on one of our own Linux servers, if the app cannot be installed on our host's server. Since we run Exchange Server, I am trying to simplify matters by hosting the mailing lists offsite, though.
Thanks for your help.
John Wheaton, Technology Coordinator St. Francis High School 233 W. Broadway Louisville, KY 40202
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