FC5: Sendmail error

[Gilbert Sebenste]

On Wed, 24 May 2006, Paul Howarth wrote:

>>>> When I manually type "newaliases" as root, it also gives me this message.
>>>> After doing a search on the Web, others have had the problem, but I
>>>> couldn't find a resolution. My permissions on the files in question:
>>>> 
>>>> -rw-r--r-- 1 root  root   9961 May 20 00:10 aliases
>>>> -rw-r----- 1 smmsp smmsp 24576 May 22 13:40 aliases.db
>>>> 
>>>> Those are correct permissions, from what I can tell. Any ideas? Now, 
>>>> here's the
>>>> kicker: When I remove aliases.db manually, and then type "newaliases"
>>>> everything is as shown above...*except* the user is root for aliases.db,
>>>> and I don't get the silly error message anymore. (Scratches head)...I
>>>> think I have owner or group permissions messed up somewhere, but I am not
>>>> familiar with the inner workings of Sendmail to figure this out.
>>>> 
>>>> Any help will be greatly appreciated!
>>> 
>>> aliases.db should be owned by root, not smmsp. Not sure how it gets that
>>> way, but I've seen that before.
>> 
>> I think I might have found the problem: in sendmail.cf (yes, I know you're 
>> not supposed to dork around with it), the trusted user was smmsp. I made it 
>> root. Is that a good idea?
>
> You shouldn't normally need a trusted user in sendmail.cf at all. It's an 
> appropriate setting in submit.cf though.
>
> I'd be inclined to do chown root /etc/aliases.db and then forget about it 
> unless it somehow gets changed back to being owned by smmsp, in which case 
> I'd be looking to find out how that happened.

Well, I did do that...change the permissions...and then this morning it 
was back to user smmsp. I have no clue how that happened. This is even 
after re-installing Sendmail.

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Gilbert Sebenste                                                     ********
(My opinions only!)                                                  ******
Staff Meteorologist, Northern Illinois University                      ****
E-mail: sebenste at weather.admin.niu.edu                                  ***
web: http://weather.admin.niu.edu                                      **
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