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Sympa is mailing list management software.

Sympa

Installing and Configuring

Prerequisites

Installation (All Debian Versions)

1. Install Sympa package:

# apt-get install sympa

Sympa creates all the tables during installation. Thus, you must provide the root password of MySQL or PostgreSQL.

The Wheezy package configures the logging to /var/log/sympa.log. For Squeeze/Oldstable you need to perform some additional steps:

Installation (Squeeze/Oldstable)

2. Configure logs:

# mkdir /var/log/sympa

local1.* /var/log/sympa/sympa.log

WWSympa

WWSympa is the web interface of Sympa. Sympa and WWSympa are in the same package : sympa. When installed, the Web interface is accessible at this URL: http://localhost/wws/

WWSympa installation

#apt-get install wwsympa

In Wheezy (stable), WWSympa is automatically setup to run using FastCGI. The package installer will create the necessary .fcgi scripts below.

In Squeeze (oldstable) Sympa daemons run by default with sympa user privileges and web interface with apache user privileges. To use FastCGI instead, you must perform all the extra steps below.

FastCGI Setup (All Debian versions)

(See also Debian bug 682562 )

Enable fast CGI in the /etc/sympa/wwsympa.conf file.

## Is fast_cgi module for Apache (or Roxen) installed (0 | 1)
## This module provide much faster web interface
use_fast_cgi    1

FastCGI Setup (extra steps for Squeeze/Oldstable)

(These steps are no longer necessary for Wheezy / Stable)

To run wwsympa with sympa privileges, you can install suexec apache module :

# apt-get install apache2-suexec
# a2enmod suexec

Also you will need fcgid apache2 module

# apt-get install libapache2-mod-fcgid
# a2enmod fcgid

Modify apache configuration file of sympa (initially in /etc/apache2/conf.d/sympa):

# Apache configuration file for Sympa

Alias /static-sympa /var/lib/sympa/static_content
Alias /wwsicons /usr/share/sympa/icons
ScriptAlias /wws /var/www/sympa/wwsympa.fcgi

  <IfModule mod_fcgid.c>
    IPCCommTimeout 120
    MaxProcessCount 2
  </IfModule>

  SuexecUserGroup sympa sympa

  <Location /wws>
    SetHandler fcgid-script
  </Location>

Attention! When you use suexec: your cgi scripts must be stored in the document root: /var/www. Thus you must create a wrapper to execute the wwsympa.fcgi in /usr/lib/cgi-bin/sympa:

# mkdir /var/www/sympa
# vim /var/www/sympa/wwsympa.fcgi

Create /var/www/sympa/wwwsympa.fcgi:

 #!/bin/sh
 /usr/lib/cgi-bin/sympa/wwsympa.fcgi

and give the correct permissions to your script, so that suexec can launch it.

# chown -R sympa:sympa /var/www/sympa/
# chmod ug+x sympa/wwsympa.fcgi 

Accessing the WWSympa interface

You can browse, send the listmaster password and send messages with the web interface (http://example.com/wws)

If apache returns an error, look at logs: /var/log/apache2/error.log and /var/log/apache2/suexec.log

If you receive an error like: mod_fcgid fails with "Premature end of script headers: wwsympa-wrapper.fcgi and your webserver error log is full of HTML output, make sure you set use_fast_cgi 1 in /etc/sympa/wwsympa.


Postfix Integration

There is an excellent Debian-specific article on Postfix configuration here: https://tribut.de/blog/sympa-and-postfix/