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.
>
> Can you tell from the timestamp when exactly this happened, and associate 
> that timestamp with a package upgrade, cron job, some event in the mail log 
> etc.?

Turns out, it was a package upgrade. I install all of the 
"updates-testing" programs, and I believe pam or something else of the 24 
ptches I downloaded yesterday fixed the problem. Nice to know it wasn't me 
for a change. Thanks for your time though...and after 3 days, I'll call it 
case closed.

SOmetimes you bleed living on the bleeding edge!

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Gilbert Sebenste                                                     ********
(My opinions only!)                                                  ******
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