FC5: Sendmail error

[Paul Howarth]

Gilbert Sebenste wrote:
> 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.?

Paul.