Severe Server Problems (FC4)

[Karl Pearson]

On Mon, 14 Aug 2006, Rick Stevens wrote:

> 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.

How do I verify that they run as those users? I see in sendmail.mc 8:12, 
which looks right. Also, sm-client.pid is chmoded to smmsp:smmsp and it 
still doesn't work. Doing a service sendmail reload succeeds for sendmail 
and fails for sm-client.

Another interesting thing is that local email fails, but if I use pine from 
my PC, it works.

>
>> 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 see nothing in it at all and the email still doesn't come... Same error, 
too. Interesting that the owner is apache:smmsp in mqueue and both files are 
there, but one starts with Q rather than q... as before. I was going to 
`watch` a cat of the file to see if a visit from another host messes up.

>
>
>> 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

I don't use caffeine. Any sympathy now... (as in 'can you hear me [whine] 
now?)

Karl

PS. I'd love to give you (Rick) ssh access and have you poke around and see 
how bad an upgrade from RH8.0 to FC4 can go... Just picture named, for 
example, without a chroot option working getting kludged back to the old 
way.

>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> - 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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-- 
karl
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  _/   _/ arl _/_/_/  _/ earson    KarlP at ourldsfamily.com
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Senior Consulting Sys/DB Analyst
http://consulting.ourldsfamily.com
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