Journal de Jacques

A petty annoyance on Ubuntu is getting all the bits of mailman to talk to each other: the mailman software itself, and in my case Postfix as the MTA and Apache as the host server.

Putting aside my complete failure to properly RTFA on the Mailman-Postfix hookup, I found an interesting problem with the default install of Mailman: if you modify permissions to allow Apache to reach the relevant cgi-bin directories, parts of Mailman stop working. Modify it back using the included check_perms script and Apache stops working.

The solution is to add the Apache user (www-data) to the Mailman group (list). Then everything works.

The symptoms are like so:

bash: ./configure: /bin/sh: bad interpreter: Permission denied

Which has nothing whatever to do with the root cause. The actual problem is that pecl downloads files to /tmp and does its work there. If /tmp is mounted as noexec, pecl will fail with errors like the one above.

Solution #1: Change the fstab for /tmp, removing the noexec option.
Solution #2: Working in another directory – such as /usr/src – manually perform the steps pecl automates. An example for xdebug is found here.