[Server-admins] Mailman and exim configuration

[Troy A. Griffitts]

Sorry guys, I guess server-admins at crosswire.org wasn't configured to 
reply-to list.  It should be now.  Resending this message...
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Got home late.  Thanks for all the investigation and comments.  A few 
more quick ones before I fall asleep.

I hack the java CORBA library to default to UTF-8 because of an 
outstanding bug in the JDK where it doesn't notice ORBit's indication 
that it is sending UTF-8.  That code is in /opt/tomcat/endorsed/  It 
works but I SUSPECT that when the UTF-8 decoder hits an encoding error, 
it throws an exception that somehow unravels to the place where a CORBA 
call is waiting for the server ORB to finish transmitting data.  I have 
reasons for suspecting this that are too long for me to go into right 
now, but it's on my list to look into and seems fairly benign.  I added 
a job to kill and restart tomcat late each night (I'm sad to say-- as I 
feel like a Windows admin for doing such).  Tomcat runs fun with no 100% 
spin, even if you hit SWORDWeb, until after a little bit of usage.  This 
all started after I hacked the Java CORBA lib.  My patch for the bug is 
submitted to Sun, so if you want to look into what I changed, you can 
probably find it in their bugtracker with a search for CORBA ORBit 
UTF-8.  I suspect a try/catch block somewhere needs to be added to keep 
the decoding exception from being thrown upstream.

I run yum update manually.  I want to see what gets updated, know when 
something warrants a server reboot, and do a rudimentary smoke screen 
test of basic services to be sure nothing was totally fouled up.

I didn't know about update.php or I would have run it (if i knew how). 
DM has graciously volunteered to own the wiki, which leaves me 
wonderfully ignorant about the mediawiki package.  I'd like to keep it 
that way, so whatever DM decided we should do (script to know when 
mediawiki is updated and do some additional task, email DM when it's 
updated, yum update post script, whatever...), I'll put in place at his 
recommendation.

Jonathan, thanks for looking into the exim/mailman stuff.  I'll have a 
look at your suggestions when I've had some rest.  I'm not amiss to 
granting permissions to people who are willing to own things long term, 
so let me know if you decide you're up for a long haul commitment.

Again thanks for all the investigation, suggestions, and general 
willingness to invest time.

     -Troy.