[lug] Searching Mailman Archives

[J. Wayde Allen]

I have several private mailing lists running under mailman, and am
wondering if there is a good way to make the archives searchable.  This is
an easy task for public archives (use htdig or something similar), however
I haven't figured out a good approach for private archives.  These require
authentication through the mailman server.  

I believe the archive storage format is pipermail and am wondering if a
search engine cgi could run on the server with access to the cgi added to
the mailman web pages?  The other idea would be to make the archives
public, but set up the web server (Apache) to require authentication for
access to these directories.  The problem here being that we'd now have
two sets of passwords.  One password to access the mailman functions, and
the other to get Apache to deliver the archives.  Maybe there is a way to
synchronize these?

I suppose a third approach would be to use Apache to restrict access to a
specific domain or sub-domain.  However, in this case it may still be nice
to limit access to only the people involved with a given project.  That
might mean restricting access to specific IP's.  Not sure that is a
particularly nice solution either.

Any ideas?

- Wayde
  (wallen at lug.boulder.co.us)