mhonarc-users

Re: Help w/ setup and hosting available?

1998-04-14 09:30:09
I'm the list owner of a new mail list that's been functioning for about 7
weeks now.  As such I've been asked countless times about when searchable
archives are going to be made available and am getting tired of making
excuses.  I've looked through much of the information regarding MHonArc and
feel that it does just what I'd expect of an archiving program, but I'm not
the right person to set this up.  I've mentioned the possibility of setting
it up to my ISP's administrator and he's pretty reluctant to allow me to
just fire up this program without his really knowing what it's all about,
and I get the impression he's not particularly anxious to get this going on
his servers anyway.  My mail list is the first that this ISP has handled,
so I'm sort of a test case there... getting the archive going is simply
asking too much of those folks.

MHonArc doesn't provide any kind of search interface, but you could set
this up with WILMA or your own homegrown variety.

I'm curious if there's anyone out there who could provide hosting for my
mail list archive and would be willing to help me with the setup?  The
listserver software that sends out the mailings is Post.Office, and I'd be
happy to share some of the saved messages I have to start getting this
archive thing off the ground.  And is it possible to run the archive on a
server which is independent of the actual listserver, say by including
MHonArc (or some alias for it) as a subscriber to the list?  Any help will
be greatly appreciated.

Yes, you can serve the archives on a different machine than the mailing
list server.  There are a few possibilities:

   1.  Mount the web server's filesystem on the mail server, then have
       MHonArc dump stuff there

   2.  Run a mail server on your web server, then send it messages that
       are supposed to be archived

   3.  A combination of the above -- send the messages to another mail 
       server that mounts the web server's filesystem

I prefer #2.  Fewer NFS dependencies (if you're using NFS), faster, less
network reliance (does your networked filesystem queue requests if the
network goes down?  my sendmail messages do).

If your list happens to be horticultural in nature, mallorn.com will
archive it for free.  I suspect that there are a lot of other "special
interest" servers out there as well.

Chris

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