Mailing lists using usenet newsgroup

[LEdWorldwide!>]

All of this talk of mailing lists sounds like too much fun to pass up the opportunity to be a part of (and it gives me a chance to put my LPI certification to good use).

I'm enthusiastic about taking on the project and can get the data from Rick.  I also like the idea of using Mailman and I'd like to consider Digital Ocean to host a VPS for us ($5-$10 per month).

I'm certainly open to other ideas/suggestions but I do know that as a group we can pool our resources and knowledge together and create some great projects.


Cheers,

-Michael Rojas-


Rick Moen <rickmoen at gmail.com> wrote:

>On Tue, Jan 6, 2015 at 2:40 PM, jim <jim at well.com> wrote:
>> I'm for MailMan. Either we wait until Rick gets to
>> it or we set up our own (after we get the backups
>> from Rick).
>
>I'm pretty sure I've sent this information to you-plural in the past,
>but I'll do it now just in case:   This is intended to help your
>collective memory and improve your process going forward.
>
>1.  GNU Mailman can be trivially configured (by the site admin) to
>permit public download of the cumulative mbox of any hosted Maliman
>mailing list.  That is the set of all past postings to date, from
>which the archives can then be recreated anywhere desired, with a
>single command (using /var/lib/mailman/bin/arch).  Thus, it is 95% of
>the important data comprising the mailing list's 'state'.  In the case
>of SF-LUG's mailing list on linuxmafia.com, the relevant URL was (and
>will again be) /http://linuxmafia.com/pipermail/sf-lug.mbox/sf-lug.mbox
>.  Not all Mailman instances are configured to enable that function,
>but all of the ones that I administer are.
>
>If I never brought that matter to Jim's attention (and I'm pretty sure
>I did), I'm doing so now.  Yr. welcome.
>
>It is common sense for you to periodically back up that file, and
>doing so is greatly in your interest.  Shortly before I started
>hosting a mailing list for SF-LUG, you guys completely lost all back
>traffic to a previous iteration of the SF-LUG mailing list somewhere
>else -- to something like a failed hard drive or such -- and at the
>time I wondered why you never bothered to back up the mbox, given your
>then-recent somewhat ignominious loss.  E.g., anyone whatsoever could
>do that task daily or weekly using a simple 'wget -c' fetch in a cron
>job.
>
>2.  The other indispensable part of a Mailman mailing list's state is
>the subscriber roster.  The mailing list admin can arrange to have
>that information mailed to interested parties periodically using the
>/var/lib/mailman/bin/list_members utility.   We might call that 4% of
>the mailing list's 'state'.  The other 1% would be things like any
>unusual mailing list settings, individual subscriber's subscription
>passwords, and the like, none of which is a huge loss if you happen to
>lose it.
>
>In the case of my server, all mailing list information is present on
>both my backups and on the live hard drives of the (down) server.  If
>you-all decide you wish to get the current data, you can visit my
>house and bring a Linux machine able to read an ext3 filesystem from a
>USB device.  I can easily give you the cumulative mbox file during
>your visit.  For the roster, I can give you Mailman's stored copy,
>which is in a Python's 'pickle' stored-data format.  You would need to
>figure out how to extract what you need from that.
>
>You have my cellular number.
>
>Might I suggest that you guys start showing some basic initiative
>towards self-preservation?  If you had bothered to do that, you would
>not have ignominiously lost your entire previous hard drive, and you
>would not be needing to ask me for 'backups from Rick'.