permissions problem on startup

[John Jolet]

On Feb 6, 2006, at 12:24 PM, Rick Chadderdon wrote:

> I ended up having to give the postfix user a shell, su to postfix and
> then run check_mailscanner.  Sounds like what you finally did.  I kept
> having little glitches with that machine, though.  Nothing serious,  
> just
> little  things like having to jump through odd hoops to launch
> MailScanner...  perldoc would never work, claiming it was missing
> modules that *were* installed...  There were a few other strange
> problems, always involving perl apps.  I'm guessing that the  
> problem was
> one of mangled permissions somewhere deep in the perl tree, but I  
> never
> found out.  I finally decided that Gentoo simply requires too much
> babysitting for me to want to use it on a production server.  Last  
> week
> I put together a Centos 4.2 box, moved all of the mail over there,
> installed the latest MailScanner and everything was fine.
>
> I really like a lot of things about Gentoo, but it's little things  
> like
> this that have made me pull it off all of my production servers. The
> primary mailserver was the last holdout.   Just curious:  Do *you* get
> an error if you try 'postdoc postdoc'?
>
you mean "perldoc postdoc"?  no errors, but I will say on this box,  
sudo doesn't work because of what it claims are permission  
problems...like root can't read /etc/sudoers...right.

I've got 30+ production gentoo boxes running and this is the first  
time i've seen anything like this happen.  I had started to set this  
box up hardened, but then changed my mind, so I could very well have  
installed pax or something like that and then not gone with the  
hardened toolchain.  Just for the record, I'm fully confident that  
the problem is NOT a mailscanner issue.  but this is a test box, and  
artifacts of this sort are acceptable at this time.  The box I REALLY  
run mail through is an FC4 box.  Just wanted to look at mailscanner  
as a replacement  for amavis-new.  Had some problems with it, and the  
debug information it gives you is useless..

> Rick
>
> John Jolet wrote:
>
>>>> yeah, I thought of that.  If I give postfix a shell, su -  
>>>> postfix  I
>>>> can view the file just fine.  It appeared to me when I looked at
>>>> that module that it was mostly concerned with ldap servers.  was I
>>>> incorrect?  I don't have any, and that portion of the config file
>>>> is commented out.  just grasping at straws at this point.
>>>
>>>
>>> I would not advise you try to work out how the configuration
>>> compiler works, it's pretty complex. :-)
>>>
>>> If you do su - postfix then cd / then cd down each dir to the   
>>> file's
>>> location, does that all work at every step?
>>
>> yes, it does.  That gave me an idea, however.  su - postfix from
>> root, THEN run check_mailscanner, and it works.  so I can start it as
>> postfix if i'm postfix.  I guess I can handle that.....but it's still
>> odd.
>
>
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