RubyForge Mailman upgrade

14 Sep 2005

After the pending message cleanup settled down I upgraded Mailman from 2.1.5 to 2.1.6. This upgrade fixes some security problems; it also has a handy DEFAULT_MAX_DAYS_TO_HOLD setting so list admins can discard held messages after 10 days or whatever. If folks use that option, it should help prevent the spam buildup again; good times!

This was a pretty straightforward upgrade; just shut down Sendmail and mailmanctl, comment out the Mailman ScriptAlias in httpd.conf, do a backup, ./configure, make, make install, and restart everything. The mailman/archives directory has a bunch of symlinks which seem to confuse tar, so I just copied all the directories except for archives into a tmp directory. make install took about 20 seconds and check_perms took about 25 seconds to run, which is understandable since we've got 700+ MB of list data (550 MB in the archives directory).

So that's done; if anyone notices anything awry, please let me know, thanks!