Severe Server Problems (FC4)

[Rick Stevens]

On Mon, 2006-08-14 at 00:40 -0600, karlp at ourldsfamily.com wrote:
> My RH8.0 email/web server crashed. I've been struggling over the weekend to
> get things back up and still some things are hammered.
> You can see them by doing mailq -qL and re-process them by doing
> for i in "ls Q*"; do sendmail -v -qI$i -d11; done
> from in /var/spool/mqueue, which has drwx --- --- permissions, which is correct.
> I'm suspect of sm-client, too, because it starts, then dies. I had to change
> the location of /var/run/sm-client.pid because it failed to start at all
> because of permissions.
> 
> Forms on my server don't submit the emails to me they once did for usage
> tracking, etc. In maillog:
>    1. Aug 14 00:25:58 moroni sendmail[25780]: NOQUEUE: SYSERR(apache): can not
> chdir(/var/spool/mqueue/): Permission denied:

You need to check the sendmail.cf and submit.cf files to see what user
the programs are trying to run as.  Generally, sendmail tries to run as
root when it's doing things such as creating mail queue entries and as
user 8:12 (mail:mail) when doing other things such as delivery and
such.  smclient usually runs as user "smmsp" at all times.

As far as /var/run/sm-client.pid, the trick is that it is created by
root's performing a "touch" of it first, then does a "chown smmsp:smmsp"
of the file BEFORE sm-client is fired up.  Check
/etc/rc.d/init.d/sendmail for details.

> It appears these errors result in the next error, which is generated by the
> following CGI command:
> cat $FNM|tr 'A-Z' 'a-z' |mail -s "Access to $ACCESS" karlp
> 
>    2. mail: invalid option -- r
> Usage: mail [-iInv] [-s subject] [-c cc-addr] [-b bcc-addr] to-addr ...
>             [-- sendmail-options ...]
>        mail [-iInNv] -f [name]
>        mail [-iInNv] [-u user]
> 554 5.3.0 unknown mailer error 1

That's rather odd.  Your command line doesn't specify a "-r" anywhere.
This leads one to believe that one of the programs (possibly "tr") got
whapped and is spewing out garbage.  You really should try redirecting
the output of it to a file to test it:

	cat $FNM|tr 'A-Z' 'a-z' >/tmp/testoutput

and you should look at the expansion of "$ACCESS" to see if it has an
embedded quote or something in it.


> I apologize for being a bit scattered. I've been relatively brain hampered for
> 3 days now... 13 hours of sleep in the past 50+ hours.

Lightweight!  I've been running on 3 hours of sleep or less per night
for 3 weeks.  If you're looking for sympathy, you've come to the WRONG
place!  :-p

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- Rick Stevens, Senior Systems Engineer     rstevens at vitalstream.com -
- VitalStream, Inc.                       http://www.vitalstream.com -
-                                                                    -
-      On a scale of 1 to 10 I'd say...  oh, somewhere in there.     -
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