Mailman on FreeBSD
I am in the midst of migrating my personal web hosting content from an old iServer FreeBSD-based virtual server platform to the next generation hosting platform that the web hosting company I work for (Verio) has developed. The new platform is also "virtual" and is FreeBSD-based, but it is identical in look and feel to a dedicated server... a virtual dedicated server if you will. The marketing term coined for the new platform is Virtual Private Server or VPS.

Everything you are viewing on this blog is hosted (and has always been hosted) on one of the new next-generation Verio Virtual Private Servers. I haven't moved the other stuff (mail, family web content) yet because of 1) inertia, 2) it ain't broke, and 3) lack of time. Recently however, the old iServer Virtual Server has become somewhat cluttered (having served our family well for almost 10 years now) and is low on free disk space (the new VPS platform has over 10x the storage capacity). Over the past few days I have been moving content over, one domain at a time. The last ones (berrett.org and sorenson.org) I'll move probably sometime late at night when no one will mind a delayed e-mail message or two).

I maintain a few mailing lists on several of the domain names I host for family and friends. I use mailman - which I highly recommend. While migrating over the mailing lists to the new platform (which basically acts and feels as if it were my FreeBSD-based desktop system), I learned a few things and thought I would share.

Setting up mailman mailing lists on a FreeBSD server:

1. Set up a 'mailman' CNAME (canonical name) in each of the domain names that will be hosting a mailing list.

2. Install mailman. This is easy... just cd to /usr/ports/mail/mailman and type:
   make install

3. Set up Apache to handle all domain requests for the mailman.* virtual host names. To do this add the following VirtualHost blocks to your Apache config file:

   <VirtualHost YOUR.IP.ADDR.ESS:80>
     SSLDisable
     User           www
     Group          www
     ServerAlias    mailman.*
     DocumentRoot   /usr/local/apache/htdocs
     TransferLog    /dev/null
     ErrorLog       /usr/local/apache/logs/error_log
     ScriptAlias    /mailman     "/usr/local/mailman/cgi-bin"
     Alias          /pipermail   "/usr/local/mailman/archives/public"
     Alias          /icons       "/usr/local/apache/icons"
     RewriteEngine  On
     RewriteCond    %{REQUEST_URI}       !^/icons/
     RewriteCond    %{REQUEST_URI}       !^/mailman/
     RewriteCond    %{REQUEST_URI}       !^/pipermail/
     RewriteRule    .*     http://%{HTTP_HOST}/mailman/listinfo [R=301]
   </VirtualHost>
   <VirtualHost YOUR.IP.ADDR.ESS:443>
     SSLEnable
     User           www
     Group          www
     ServerAlias    mailman.*
     DocumentRoot   /usr/local/apache/htdocs
     TransferLog    /dev/null
     ErrorLog       /usr/local/apache/logs/error_log
     ScriptAlias    /mailman     "/usr/local/mailman/cgi-bin"
     Alias          /pipermail   "/usr/local/mailman/archives/public"
     Alias          /icons       "/usr/local/apache/icons"
     RewriteEngine  On
     RewriteCond    %{REQUEST_URI}       !^/icons/
     RewriteCond    %{REQUEST_URI}       !^/mailman/
     RewriteCond    %{REQUEST_URI}       !^/pipermail/
     RewriteRule    .*     http://%{HTTP_HOST}/mailman/listinfo [R=301]
   </VirtualHost>

4. Set up the new mailing lists. cd to /usr/local/mailman and for each mailing list type:
   bin/newlist --urlhost=mailman.domain.name \
      --emailhost=domain.name listname

   where "domain.name" is the domain name that is hosting the mailing list name "listname". Note: I broke up the newlist command into two lines... type it as one line on the command prompt.

Works like a champ.