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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