Things look quiet here. But I've been doing a lot of blogging at
dan.langille.org because I prefer WordPress now.
Not all my posts there are FreeBSD related.
I am in the midst of migrating The FreeBSD Diary over to WordPress
(and you can read about that here).
Once the migration is completed, I'll move the FreeBSD posts into the
new FreeBSD Diary website.
This article will be appended to from time to time as I encounter new and
wonderful problems with majordomo. Actually, to be fair, majordomo
works well for me. It's only when I start changing things, like directory
permissions that I get into trouble.
Note, when you see example.org on this page, it was probably freebsddiary.org until
I changed it because I was getting spam.
MAJORDOMO ABORT (mj_digest)!!
If you find this message:
Date sent: Sun, 7 May 2000 12:24:33 +1200 (NZST)
To: Majordomo-Owner@example.org
From: majordomo@example.org
Subject: MAJORDOMO ABORT (mj_digest)
Send reply to: majordomo@example.org
--
MAJORDOMO ABORT (mj_digest)!!
open(MSG, ">/usr/local/majordomo/lists/freebsddiary.org/digests/
freshports-digest/001"): Permission denied
...then I have the solution for you.
The directory in question (freshports-digests) needs execute permission. So make
sure that directory is chmod u+x.
directory permissions must be correct20 May 2000
Today I found that the FreeBSD Diary Announce
mailing list was not working. In fact, the last message didn't even make it out
to the list members. And no error message bounced back to me. After much
searching and comparisons to working mailing lists, I found the error to be directory
permissions.
The breakthough occurred when I tried to verify one of the mailing list
address:
OK. That's pretty clear. Then I compared the directory permissions on the
freebsddiary.org directory with the freshports.org directory:
drwxr--r-- 4 majordom majordom 1024 May 20 15:10 freebsddiary.org
drwxr-xr-x 5 majordom majordom 512 May 20 14:43 freshports.org
As you can see, freshports.org had +x on group and other. And I'm pretty sure
sendmail came under other. So I did this:
chmod g+x freebsddiary.org
I tried again. Same error. OK. One more chmod:
chmod o+x freebsddiary.org
This time, the "sendmail -bv" took a long time to complete (I assume it was
resolving all the email addresses on the mailing list) but it did succeed.
list owner not found12 May 2003
I was moving some lists from one box to another and actually changing domains. In fact, I was
moving the announcement list for this website from freebsddiary.org
to lists.freebsddiary.org. The goal was simplification of background administration tasks.
I struggled with this error for about an hour (note that I have changed the domain name to
freebsddiary.org
and the list name to mylist):
I looked everywere in my aliases and virtualuser files for the problem. I found nothing. Then I decided
to manually issue the command which Postfix was running:
Where ~/msg contained sample text which I wanted to send to the list. The
error became obvious immediately. A quick modification of
/usr/local/majordomo/majordomo.lists.example.org.cf. For those curious, I had
to change this line from:
$listdir = "$homedir/lists/example.org";
to:
$listdir = "$homedir/lists/lists.example.org";
The lesson: when it's not doing what you want, do it yourself. And find the error.
MAJORDOMO WARNING (mj_majordomo)4 November 2005
I started getting floods emails like this:
To: Majordomo-Owner@lists.example.org
From: majordomo@lists.example.org
Subject: MAJORDOMO WARNING (mj_majordomo)
Reply-To: majordomo@lists.example.org
Message-Id: <20051104183428.A206F5C8E@nezlok.example.org>
Date: Fri, 4 Nov 2005 10:34:28 -0800 (PST)
X-Virus-Scanned: by amavisd-new at example.org
X-Virus-Scanned: by amavisd-new at example.org
X-PM-PLACEHOLDER: .
--
MAJORDOMO WARNING (mj_majordomo)!!
open of temp file '/usr/local/majordomo/lists/lists.example.org/shlock.93069' failed: Permission denied
In all, I got about 1160 of these messages within an 8 hour period. That's about 5 every two minutes. It was not pleasant.
I also noticed that the Majordomo perl script was running:
It took me quite a while to find the cause of the problem. I did the usual things of checking for permission on the majordomo-related
alias and mapping files. They need to be chown majordom (no, that's not a typo, the Majordomo user in FreeBSD is majordom;
just eight characters).
The solution was chmod u+x for the directories in which my majordomo files resided. For example:
