# 4 Check your installation

After you've run make install, you should check that your installation has all the correct permissions and group ownerships by running the check_perms script. First change to the installation (i.e. $prefix) directory, then run the bin/check_perms program. Don't try to run bin/check_perms from the source directory; it will only run from the installation directory.

If this reports no problems, then it's very likely <wink> that your installation is set up correctly. If it reports problems, then you can either fix them manually, re-run the installation, or use bin/check_perms to fix the problems (probably the easiest solution):

- You need to become the user that did the installation, and that owns all the files in $prefix, or root.

- Run bin/check_perms -f

- Repeat previous step until no more errors are reported!

Warning: If you're running Mailman on a shared multiuser system, and you have mailing lists with private archives, you may want to hide the private archive directory from other users on your system. In that case, you should drop the other execute permission (o-x) from the archives/private directory. However, the web server process must be able to follow the symbolic link in public directory, otherwise your public Pipermail archives will not work. To set this up, become root and run the following commands:

    # cd <prefix>/archives
    # chown <web-server-user> private
    # chmod o-x private

You need to know what user your web server runs as. It may be `www`, `apache`, `httpd` or `nobody`, depending on your server's configuration.