Sympa is designed to manage multiple distinct mailing list servers on a single host with a single Sympa installation. Sympa virtual robots are like Apache virtual hosting. Sympa virtual robot definition includes a specific email address for the robot itself and its lists and also a virtual http server. Each robot provides access to a set of lists, each list is related to only one robot.
Most configuration parameters can be define for each robot except general Sympa installation parameters (binary and spool location, smtp engine, antivirus plugging,...).
A robot is named by its domain, let's say mydomainorgand defined by a directory ~sympa/etc/mydomainorg. This directory must contain at least a robot.conf file. This files has the same format as /etc/sympa.conf (have a look at robot.conf in the sample dir). Only the following parameters can be redefined for a particular robot :
These settings overwrite the equivalent global parameter as defined in /etc/sympa.conf for mydomainorgrobot ; the main listmaster still has privileges on Virtual Robots though. The http_host parameter is compared by wwsympa with the SERVER_NAME environment variable to recognize which robot is in used.
~sympa/etc/mydomainorg/wws_templates/, ~sympa/etc/mydomainorg/templates/, ~sympa/etc/mydomainorg/scenari/ directries are searched when loading templates or scenari before searching into ~sympa/etc and ~sympa/bin/etc. This allows to define different privileges and a different GUI for a Virtual Robot.