Postorius is running. I just removed all mailing lists, and created new empty ones. These now show in the Apache2 website, via the link to Postorius I assume. Then I imported members from the old mailing list "Templist" into the new one. Now the "templist" is no longer visible on the website! It is here: https://sartrack.nz/mailman3/ Note that the existing list "Templist" is missing.

Now I need to login as 'superuser' or whatever it is called, so I can manage all the lists. Where do I set up my login and password for access via the web browser?

On 5/22/23 12:57, ceo@sartrack.nz wrote:

Postorius is running. I just removed all mailing lists, and created new empty ones. These now show in the Apache2 website, via the link to Postorius I assume. Then I imported members from the old mailing list "Templist" into the new one. Now the "templist" is no longer visible on the website!

Did you do this import with mailman import21? If so, did you run it as the Mailman user and not as root?

It is here: https://sartrack.nz/mailman3/ Note that the existing list "Templist" is missing.

https://sartrack.nz/mailman3/ is missing CSS. Apache doesn't know how to access /static/ or you never built it with the django admin collectstatic command.

Now I need to login as 'superuser' or whatever it is called, so I can manage all the lists. Where do I set up my login and password for access via the web browser?

You create a superuser with the django admin createsuperuser command. How you invoke the django admin command depends on how you installed Mailman. Please tell us how you installed Mailman so we don't have to guess about this and other things.

-- Mark Sapiro <mark@msapiro.net> The highway is for gamblers, San Francisco Bay Area, California better use your sense - B. Dylan

On 5/22/23 14:48, ceo@sartrack.nz wrote:

Thanks; There has never been a 'Mailman' user. I do have a www-data user (all Apache2 data' and there is a 'list' user.

So what I refer to as the Mailman user (a generic term) is list in your case.

I may have run the import fuction as root, but I then used chown() to set the directory tree /var/lib/mailman3/* to user 'list'.

OK

So I upgraded Debian 10 to Debian 11. This also upgraded Apache2 I assume, but I kept the original (single) config file.

I then installed the whole Mailman3 package with 'apt'. I may also have installed additional missing bits afterwards, as I think it was not complete. I initially tried to use MariaDB but the installation failed completly because it never asked for the MariaDB root password, and as a result of that everyting else failed too. Then I un-installed 5 times, and then I finally went for the 'default' database system.

I then edited the file with the recommended settings for Mailman3: Alias /mailman3/favicon.ico /var/lib/mailman3/web/static/postorius/img/favicon.ico Alias /mailman3/static /var/lib/mailman3/web/static

<Directory "/var/lib/mailman3/web/static"> Require all granted </Directory>

<IfModule mod_proxy_uwsgi.c> ProxyPass /mailman3/favicon.ico ! ProxyPass /mailman3/static ! ProxyPass /mailman3 unix:/run/mailman3-web/uwsgi.sock|uwsgi://localhost/ </IfModule>

So clearly Apache2 manages to access the data supplied by Postorius because it sees the lists (at least the empty ones). -What user should the whole system running under: 'list'? of 'www-data'?

• Is there anything else I should tell Apache2?

All the web based stuff is a Django application. Django is run by uWSGI which probably runs as www-data, but Django only accesses hyperkitty, postorius and django-mailman3 and other Django related tables in the database. It doesn't need access to file system files other than things like wsgi.py, urls.py, settings.py and settings_local.py and only read access to these.

All the mailman3 file system stuff has to be read/write/searchable by list.

Now I tried to use "django-admin createsuperuser". This also fails because of this error: ImportError: cannot import name 'force_text' from 'django.utils.encoding' (/usr/local/lib/python3.9/dist-packages/django/utils/encoding.py) And I cannot find where this 'force_text' is called from. It must be removed as it is too old.

It seems your Django installation is broken. Do

cd /usr/local/lib/python3.9/dist-packages/django grep -r force_text

to find where force_text is called, or maybe add

def force_text(s, encoding='utf-8', strings_only=False, errors='strict'): return force_str(s, encoding, strings_only, errors)

to /usr/local/lib/python3.9/dist-packages/django/utils/encoding.py

-- Mark Sapiro <mark@msapiro.net> The highway is for gamblers, San Francisco Bay Area, California better use your sense - B. Dylan

On 5/22/23 14:55, ceo@sartrack.nz wrote:

I just tried to to a dpkg-reconfigure mailman3-web

This ALSO fails with ImportError: cannot import name 'force_text' from 'django.utils.encoding' (/usr/local/lib/python3.9/dist-packages/django/utils/encoding.py)

So I cannot configure it. Where is the fault?

There is an inconsistency in your Django installation. force_text was deprecated in Django 3.0 and removed in Django 4.0 Nothing in Django 4.0+ should be importing force_text.

-- Mark Sapiro <mark@msapiro.net> The highway is for gamblers, San Francisco Bay Area, California better use your sense - B. Dylan

On 5/23/23 17:47, ceo@sartrack.nz wrote:

You should never have made the mailman so incredibly complicated with massive third-party software required, all of which did not install properly, and of which documention is either incomplete or plain wrong. And with configuration files all over the place, which cannot be found...... anyway.

I understand that installation of Mailman 3 is much more complex than was Mailman 2.1, but I think the installation doc at https://docs.mailman3.org/en/latest/install/virtualenv.html can be followed step by step. That is our intent and if there are issues with it we will correct them.

Issues with installation of the Debian/Ubuntu packages and documentation or lack thereof is beyond our control and we would prefer you follow our recommended installation which we can support.

-- Mark Sapiro <mark@msapiro.net> The highway is for gamblers, San Francisco Bay Area, California better use your sense - B. Dylan