[SOLVED]Re: sendmail problems
Paul Howarth
paul at city-fan.org
Tue Jan 11 17:29:23 UTC 2005
Sharon Kimble wrote:
> Paul Howarth wrote:
>>What you should be worried about is how your system got into this state
>>in the first place. Any ideas on how someone running as root could
>>change the permissions of the root directory so that any regular user
>>could create, delete and rename files there? For instance, on your
>>system a regular user could run the command "mv /lib /trash" and
>>completely break your system in a way that would be quite difficult to
>>recover from.
>
> Thanks, this sorted it, and I've got sendmail working again.
>
> Regarding the other problem - the last sendmail message was at 0500 on
> Sunday last ..... so its something that happened (or I did) between then
> and now. I'm currently investigating.
A couple of possibilities:
1. See if there are any files/directories owned by a non-root user in
the root directory. That might provide a clue if there are any such
files/directories.
2. Are you in the habit of logging in as root or leaving a terminal
window with a root shell running? If so, you might have inadvertently
typed a chmod command or run a script in the wrong directory, as root,
by mistake. This is why people regularly recommend only switching to
root when you really need to run a command as root, and then switch back.
Paul.
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