1.4. Failure to exec script. WANTED gid 0, GOT gid 12 (group mismatch error)

NOTE: This is the most common and frequent question asked on the Mailman support lists.

See also the Mailman FAQ entry at <Failure to exec script. WANTED gid 31, GOT gid -1. (Reconfigure to take -1?)>.

Have you ever gotten the following error message?

The original message was received at Tue, 6 Nov 2001 16:27:56 -0500 from IDENT:smmsp@localhost [127.0.0.1]

   ----- The following addresses had permanent fatal errors -----


"|/home/mailman/mail/mailman_wrapper post test"

    (reason: 2)
    (expanded from: <test@ns.abs-comptech.com>)

   ----- Transcript of session follows -----

Message delivered to mailing list <test@ns.abs-comptech.com>; 
Failure to exec script. WANTED gid 0, GOT gid 12. (Reconfigure to take 12?) 
554 5.3.0 unknown mailer error 2

Normally you will need to reconfigure the software. You can do this by issuing the following commands in the Source Code directory.

  # make clean

  # echo "NOTE: The following values for the GID's are example
          values.  The ones needed by your system will likely be
          different.  Check your MTA, web server configuration, and
          logged error messages for details and the correct values.

  # configure --with-cgi-gid=233 --with-mail-gid=12
  # make install

Sometimes this still does not solve the problem. In these cases, you need to check the following for the source of the problem:

For those people using Sendmail as their MTA under Mailman :

1. Does the smrsh directory contain a LINK to the actual Binary. Placing a Binary in the directory will have sendmail use the binary file, not the file which you are compiling.
2. If you renamed the file (due to a conflict with Majordomo), are you using a Link to the Mailman binary wrapper file?

    [root@ns mail]# ls -l
    total 32
    lrwxrwxrwx    1 root     root           26 Nov  7 09:37 mailman_wrapper -> /home/mailman/mail/wrapper*
    -rwxr-sr-x    1 root     mailman     31000 Nov  7 09:39 wrapper*
    [root@ns mail]#

Note that in Mailman 2.1.x the wrapper program is called 'mailman' while in 2.0.x it was called 'wrapper'.

eg - on a redhat system

 [root@server smrsh]# ls -al
 lrwxrwxrwx    1 root     root           31 Jul 15 15:07 mailman -> /usr/local/mailman/mail/mailman

For those unfamiliar with unix - the command to make a link is

 ln -s <filename> in the directory you want to make a link from.

on the redhat system above, this will look like this.

 ln -s /usr/local/mailman/mail/mailman

If you installed from RPMs or some other form of binary package, you either need to get different packages which are configured correctly, or you need to install the correctly configured code from source.

Go to your source for your binary packages to see if they can help you with this problem.

Converted from the Mailman FAQ Wizard

This is one of many Frequently Asked Questions.