Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 455185
Misleading RedirectMatch in /etc/httpd/conf.d/mailman.conf
Last modified: 2013-04-12 15:48:10 EDT
The mailman rpm installs /etc/httpd/conf.d/mailman.conf which contains the following: ------------------------------- # Uncomment the following line, replacing www.example.com with your server's # name, to redirect queries to /mailman to the listinfo page (recommended). #RedirectMatch ^/mailman[/]*$ http://www.example.com/mailman/listinfo ------------------------------- While this may be appropriate for installations where all mailman lists are in the one www.example.com domain, in an installation where there are mailman lists in multiple virtual domains, a more appropriate redirect is RedirectMatch ^/mailman[/]*$ /mailman/listinfo I think this latter redirect should be the default and the one containing scheme and host should be indicated as only being appropriate if you wish to redirect say http://other.example.com/mailman to http://www.example.com/mailman/listinfo.
I have just seen that this bug appears to be a duplicate of Bug 125396:. John Dennis says in a comment to that bug: <quote> I would think this would return a redirect to a client that is neither a properly formed URL nor would it contain the server address component of the URL which the client needs. Note this is not redirected internally to the apache server. </quote> While the above is true, it is not a problem. The browser issues the original http GET to Host: www.example.com for path /mailman. It receives the 302 indicating Location: /mailman/listinfo so it issues another GET to the same host/scheme for path /mailman/listinfo. It works just the same as an href= in a document. I.e., it could be href="http://www.example.com/mailman/listinfo", or it could be href="/mailman/listinfo". It works either way. In fact, depending on Apache's error documents, it will return a document along with the 302 that might look like <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//IETF//DTD HTML 2.0//EN">\n <html><head>\n <title>302 Found</title>\n </head><body>\n <h1>Found</h1>\n <p>The document has moved <a href="/mailman/listinfo">here</a>.</p>\n <hr>\n <address>Apache/2.2.3 (CentOS) Server at www.example.com Port 80</address>\n </body></html>\n
This request was evaluated by Red Hat Product Management for inclusion in the current release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Because the affected component is not scheduled to be updated in the current release, Red Hat is unfortunately unable to address this request at this time. Red Hat invites you to ask your support representative to propose this request, if appropriate and relevant, in the next release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
This request was erroneously denied for the current release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The error has been fixed and this request has been re-proposed for the current release.
It should be possible to do it with the current version of httpd in rhel5. Proposing for fastrack, because it's only change in the comment and does not affect actual mailman configuration.
I am sorry, but it is now too late in the RHEL-5 release cycle. RHEL-5.10 (the next RHEL-5 minor release) is going to be the first production phase 2 [1] release of RHEL-5. Since phase 2 we'll be addressing only security and critical issues. This one issue is fixed in RHEL-6 therefore I am closing the bug as NEXTRELEASE. [1] https://access.redhat.com/support/policy/updates/errata/