The mailing list for listmasters using Sympa

[Thomas Berry <address@concealed>]

We took the opposite approach: our list server member management was 
incorporated with our existing group management which is stored in a 
centrally managed LDAP directory.  Sympa has the ability to integrate 
with LDAP and provides two level LDAP query capability which allowed us 
to integrate mailing list membership with groups where the member's 
distinguished names (DN) point to the members' entries (where their 
email addresses are found) also stored in the LDAP directory.

Although it might not be necessary now (we're still running 6.0), at the 
time we had to disable Sympa's ldap-to-list synchronizations.  Instead, 
we went with the following list update model:

1) Updates are made to list members stored in Sympa's databases when any 
changes to an LDAP group are made.

The update is initiated by the groups web interface that was developed 
to manage the LDAP groups; the interface remotely calls a script (ssh) 
on the list server which was an adaption of Sympa's "reload_list_config" 
function

2) Updates are made to list members ... when an email message is posted 
to a mailing list.

Instead of doing this, we could have just had a replica LDAP directory 
dedicated to our list server, but then there might still be latency 
between the time a group is updated and the time that Sympa synchronizes 
the lists.  We had a requirement to provide real-time updates between 
LDAP group membership and list membership.

We also have basic mailing list configuration settings stored in the 
LDAP directory.  This was done to simplify the list configuration 
management. We used Sympa's ability to extend the list-family and 
retrieved and translated the list settings stored in the LDAP directory 
into Sympa's list config settings when a list is updated. All list 
configuration in Sympa's web interface were disabled.  Although setting 
this up was complicated and required a lot of work upfront, it has 
greatly reduced the complexity to the users who can self-provision their 
own mailing lists.

We now have almost 6000 mailing lists and growing.  All of which are 
associated with groups that are also used for other purposes, primarily 
authentication of other applications also integrated with LDAP.

Thomas


On 09/08/2011 09:49 AM, Eileen Roach wrote:
>    We are considering using Sympa for our campus Identity Infrastructure
> Groups Management tool -- so for groups other than mailing lists too.
> Are there other campus's doing the same? And if so, any pros/cons that
> we should consider?
>
> Thanks in advance,
>
> Eileen