Sympa

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Sympa

Introduction

This document, under construction, aims at helping you in installing and configuring Sympa[1] on Gentoo Linux.

This document is updated to version 5.3.4 of Sympa.

Getting and installing Sympa

At present time, sympa is not in the official portage tree, although there seem to be plans for this to happen. In the meanwhile, you can grab an archive here:

http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=86734[2]

Take a look at the attachments and get the most recent overlay archive. Unpack it in your local overlay (or, better yet, create a new local overlay for Sympa). Then, add the following to your /etc/portage/package.keywords (adjust accordingly if you're not on x86 platform):

net-mail/sympa ~x86
dev-perl/MIME-Charset ~x86
dev-perl/Crypt-CipherSaber ~x86
net-mail/mhonarc ~x86
dev-perl/MIME-EncWords ~x86

If you want SOAP support, set appropriate USE flag in /etc/portage/package.use:

net-mail/sympa soap

At this point you just need to:

emerge -av sympa

And then start it and/or add it to your RC:

/etc/init.d/sympa start
rc-update add sympa default

Configuring the web server

On Gentoo web-related files are in different locations than the one you can read of in the official Sympa documentation. Perl programs are in /usr/libexec/sympa/, while static files reside in /var/spool/sympa/static_content. The usage of fastcgi and of the C suid wrapper is highly recommended.

This is a sampe Apache 2.2 virtual host configuration file for Sympa web interface:

<VirtualHost sympa.domain.com:80>
    ServerAdmin admin@domain.com
    DocumentRoot /var/www/sympa.domain.com
    ServerName sympa.domain.com
 
    Alias /static-sympa /var/spool/sympa/static_content
    Alias /sympa /usr/libexec/sympa/wwsympa-wrapper.fcgi
 
    <location /sympa>
        SetHandler fcgid-script
        Options ExecCGI
        Order allow,deny
        allow from all
    </location>
    <Location /static-sympa>
        Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
        Order allow,deny
        Allow from all
    </Location>
</VirtualHost>

Make sure you have the following line in /etc/sympa/wwsympa.conf for fastcgi to work:

use_fast_cgi    1

Sympa can also work in CGI mode, but it'll be much slower.

For some reason the icons are not correctly installed into the static content path, so you'll need to do:

cd /var/spool/sympa/static_content/
ln -s /usr/share/sympa/icons .

in order to be able to see them on the web interface.

Web server configuration for SOAP web services

Web services are one of the most interesting features of Sympa. Configuring them is as simple as adding another alias for another fastcgi script. For instance, with Apache:

Alias /sympasoap /usr/libexec/sympa/sympa_soap_server-wrapper.fcgi
<Location /sympasoap>
    SetHandler fcgid-script
    Options ExecCGI
    Order allow,deny
    allow from all
</Location>