The amazing Archive.org just posted a Mac OS 7 emulator and it’s amazing. See, “Early Macintosh Emulation Comes to the Archive“. Given my first computer was a “Fat Mac“, seeing this operating system brought to life brought so many memories back. Thank you archive.org!! The even support full screen so you can run a 512×342 resolution emulator on a 4k monitor in a browser under Ubuntu ;)
Recently I was tasked at work to get an instance of Sympa set up. Their docs are a bit scattered, but I found a promising post on debian.org which suggested I could get away with an apt-get install instead of needing to compile from source. Well, it turns out I did get it working, but only after a lot of trial and error. Given that some one else might be trying to do this, and because I had to document the exact steps for work, here’s a handy dandy blog post which I hope will help some one trying to do the same thing.
Good news for those looking to do this for Sympa 6.2 (latest at time of publishing), I have a post on how to do this exact thing on the soon to be released Ubuntu 17.04 with Sympa 6.2. Stay tuned!
This post assumes you have root on your box. It assumes you have Apache2 installed. It assumes you’re running a stock Ubuntu 16.04 install. It assumes you want to run Sympa on your server. It also assumes you’ll be using Postfix as the lists MTA. It assumes you have a DNS entry (A record) for the server. As well it assumes you also have an MX record pointing to the A record or no MX record so the MX defaults to the A record. If this doesn’t apply to you, caveat emptor!
To recap, that’s:
I also was using this server solely to serve Sympa mail and web traffic so if you have a multi-tenant/multi-use server, it may be more complicated.
These steps assume you’re going to install Sympa on list.example.com. There’s no reason you couldn’t use example.com instead.
apt-get install -y sympa
if ($cookie and $cookie =~ /^\d\{,16}$/) {
use_fast_cgi 1
If you don’t do this step, you’ll see full HTML pages show up in /var/logs/syslog and only 500 errors in the browser :(
lists.example.com should show the sympa UI, w00t!
update-rc.d sympa defaults update-rc.d sympa enable
myhostname = lists.example.com smtpd_tls_cert_file=/full/path/to/cert/apache/uses.pem smtpd_tls_key_file=/full/path/to/key/apache/uses.pem alias_maps = hash:/etc/aliases,hash:/etc/mail/sympa/aliases alias_database = hash:/etc/aliases,hash:/etc/mail/sympa/aliases mydestination = $myhostname, lists.example.com, , localhost relay_domains = $mydestination, lists.example.com
listmaster email1@example.com,other_here@domain.com domain lists.example.com wwsympa_url https://lists.example.com/wws
default_home lists create_list intranet
The “intranet” value will prevent some one from signing up and requesting a list with any approval.
## main sympa aliases sympa: "| /usr/lib/sympa/bin/queue sympa@lists.example.com" listmaster: "| /usr/lib/sympa/bin/queue sympa@lists.example.com" bounce+*: "| /usr/lib/sympa/bin/bouncequeue sympa@lists.example.com" sympa-request: email1@example.com sympa-owner: email1@example.com
newaliases reboot
Sympa should now be up and running at lists.example.com! All mail and and out should work so you can run your own list server. Please report any problems so I can keep this post updated and accurate – thanks!
