The mailing list for listmasters using Sympa

["William F. Dudley Jr." <address@concealed>]

Stefan,

Thanks! I hadn't realized/remembered that there was a "sympa.log" file.
That showed a permission problem.  Apparently the FreeBSD package doesn't
install with the right permissions everywhere.

In /usr/local/share/sympa, I did:

chown sympa:www arc bounce list_data
chmod g+w arc bounce list_data

(less typing: chown sympa:www [abl]*
etc.)

I don't know if www needs write permission, but this fixed the immediate
problem.  Perhaps the setuid wrapper handles the www-ownership problem?

The secondary problem was that I couldn't get the fastcgi method to
work with my virtual hosting, where the sympa "home" directory is
sympa.dudley.nu.  Some things would work, other things would fail because
the sympa-generated URL was "sympa.dudley.nu/admin/<listname>", but
It really needed to be "sympa.dudley.nu/sympa/admin/<listname>.

Rather than spend a lot more hours on fighting with that, I'm reverting
to my re-write rule approach, which works and all the URLs are correct:

   RewriteEngine on
   RewriteRule ^$      /cgi-bin/wwsympa-wrapper.fcgi  [L]
   RewriteRule ^/static-sympa/(.*)$    /docs/static/$1  [L]
   RewriteRule ^/(.*)$ /cgi-bin/wwsympa-wrapper.fcgi/$1        [L]

where the cgi-bin directory has a symbolic link to the wwsympa-wrapper.fcgi
script, and docs/static is a symbolic link to:

   /usr/local/share/sympa/static

So it appears that sympa is now "working", though of course more testing is
in order.

One mis-feature immediately apparent: mass-subscribe of a list of users
would be better if the format was:

Real Name <email.address>

Rather than:

email.address Real Name
which is a non-standard way of representing email accounts, IMHO.

Again, thanks for your help. 

Bill Dudley


---------- Original Message -----------
From: "Stefan Hornburg (Racke)" <address@concealed>
To: address@concealed
Sent: Wed, 20 May 2020 10:35:01 +0200
Subject: Re: [sympa-users] new sympa install, apache2.4; cannot create list

> On 5/19/20 2:24 AM, William F. Dudley Jr. wrote:
> > I'm still fighting to get the sympa web interface working.
> > 
> > New install of Sympa 6.2.54
> > 
> > Apache 2.4.43 on FreeBSD 11.3, set up for Virtual Hosts since I serve
> > multiple domains.
> > 
> > The domain for my sympa web install is http://sympa.dudley.nu
> > 
> > It seems sympa must be accessed using /sympa, so the URL is
> > http://sympa.dudley.nu/sympa.
> > 
> > I cannot get the web interface to "work".  It comes up and looks OK,
> > but if I try to create a list, I get the helpful message:
> > "INTERNAL SERVER ERROR (create_list) -"
> > 
> > How do I debug this failure?
> > 
> > Here is the error message from the fcgi script (from the Apache logs):
> > 
> > [Mon May 18 20:19:44.965251 2020] [proxy_fcgi:error] [pid 70350] [client 
> > 98.109.205.15:34844] AH01071: Got error '[Mon May 18 20:19:43 2020] 
> > wwsympa.fcgi: Use of uninitialized value in string ne at 
> > /usr/local/libexec/sympa/Sympa/Spindle/AuthorizeRequest.pm line 118.\n', 
> > referer: http://sympa.dudley.nu/sympa/create_list_request
> > 
> > Thanks,
> > Bill Dudley
> > 
> >
> 
> Hello Bill,
> 
> this is a Perl warning and should not cause an internal server error.
> 
> Please also check the Sympa log and provide your Apache configuration 
> related to Sympa.
> 
> Regards
>        Racke
> 
> -- 
> Ecommerce and Linux consulting + Perl and web application programming.
> Debian and Sympa administration. Provisioning with Ansible.
------- End of Original Message -------