FC5: Sendmail error

[Paul Howarth]

Gilbert Sebenste wrote:
> On Tue, 23 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.

Paul.