Some root mail not coming through [Solved?]

[John Swartzentruber]

On 12/8/2004 10:40 AM John Swartzentruber wrote:
> On 12/7/2004 9:56 PM Ow Mun Heng wrote:
> 
>> On Tue, 2004-12-07 at 22:24, John Swartzentruber wrote:
>>
>>> On 12/5/2004 3:39 AM Ow Mun Heng wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>> On Sun, 2004-12-05 at 04:29, John Swartzentruber wrote:
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> I'm guessing that arthur is the one which is relaying all the 
>>>> messages??
>>>>
>>>> Can you check if the mesage queue in buster is in the queue?
>>>>
>>>
>>> /var/spool/mqueue is empty
>>> /var/spool/clientmqueue is empty
>>>                Total requests: 0
>>
>>
>>
>> and I presume there's really nothing in those directories? (I'm sure
>> there isn't, just asking the obvious)
> 
> 
> Correct, they are empty (i.e., "ls -a" shows only "." and "..").
> 
> 
>>> FYI, I just tried sending mail from buster using the "mail" command. 
>>
>>
>> What sort of MTA do you use? Sendmail? The mail command is, mailx I 
>> presume?
>>
>> /bin/mailx->mail
> 
> 
> Yes, I am using Sendmail. The mail command is /bin/mail. I don't have a 
> "mailx" program.
> 
> 
>>> From the manpage of "man 5 crontab"
>>
>> In addition to LOGNAME, HOME, and SHELL, cron(8) will look at MAILTO
>> if it has any reason to send  mail  as  a result of running commands 
>> in ``this'' crontab.  If MAILTO is defined (and non-empty), mail is
>> sent to the user so named.  If MAILTO is defined but empty  
>> (MAILTO=""),  no  mail  will be sent.  Otherwise mail is sent to the 
>> owner
>> of the crontab.  This option is useful if you decide on /bin/mail
>> instead of  /usr/lib/sendmail  as  your  mailer  when  you
>> install cron -- /bin/mail doesn't do aliasing, and UUCP usually 
>> doesn't read its mail.
>>
>> Can you check your MAILTO variable??
> 
> 
> I don't have a "MAILTO" variable. Or at least when I do "set" as root, 
> nothing shows up.
> 
> I also verified that all of the scripts in /etc/cron.daily are owned by 
> root, and /etc/crontab runs "run-parts" on /etc/cron.daily as root, and 
> /usr/bin/run-parts is owned by root.
> 
> This is all very weird. I can't see why "mail -s test root <file" 
> delivers fine, but the normal logwatch delivery doesn't come through.
> 
>> /shot in the dark
> 
> 
> At this point, that's what I'm looking for. Unfortunately nothing seems 
> to have hit yet. Thanks for trying.


I *may* have found the problem. It seems everything I thought was 
happening was really a red herring. I believe the problem was not that 
the logwatch messages were not being sent or received, it was that the 
logwatch in the cron was never finishing. Before I turned on Arthur, I 
tried running /etc/cron.daily/00-logwatch directly. It just sat there 
for a long time. Then a light went on in my head. I have an NFS mount 
for arthur in my /etc/fstab on buster. When I umount that, 00-logwatch 
finishs when I run in directly. Something in the logwatch process 
appears to be waiting for /mnt/arthur to be valid before the program 
finishes.

Now, if things run correctly overnight tonight, I think I've got the 
problem solved. Grrr. I hate it when I jump to bad conclusions.

Thanks again to everyone who helped me with this odd problem.