Severe Server Problems (FC4)

Rick Stevens rstevens at vitalstream.com
Tue Aug 15 01:12:53 UTC 2006


On Mon, 2006-08-14 at 14:21 -0600, Karl Pearson wrote:
> 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.

Yes 8:12 is right (check /etc/passwd for user mail).

>  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.

Uh, hmmm.  Well, submit.cf should have "O RunAsUser=smmsp" in it, which
should also make it run as user smmsp.  The error message you get when
you reload sendmail refers to an inability to open
/var/run/sm-client.pid?  That's just plain odd.  For giggles, can you
"service sendmail stop", then delete /var/run/sm-client.pid, then
"service sendmail start" and see what that does?

> 
> 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.

Queue files that start with a "Q" indicate that the delivery attempts
have completely failed (all retries exhausted).  That usually indicates
a bogus "To" address, the destination server isn't listening to SMTP,
or it's rejecting the mail repeatedly.  Check the content of the Q file
and its associated "d" file for clues.

> >
> >
> >> 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?)

Heheheheheh!  And in answer to your missive...no, I still don't feel
your pain.  As a matter of fact, I'm rather numb all over.  I don't know
if I feel my own toes at this point.

> 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.

Oh, my GAWD!  8.0 to FC4?  Yikes!  Just 8.0 alone is frightening.  That
was possibly one of the worst RH releases in known times!

----------------------------------------------------------------------
- Rick Stevens, Senior Systems Engineer     rstevens at vitalstream.com -
- VitalStream, Inc.                       http://www.vitalstream.com -
-                                                                    -
-              Never eat anything larger than your head              -
----------------------------------------------------------------------




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