Severe Server Problems (FC4) - Solutions

karlp at ourldsfamily.com karlp at ourldsfamily.com
Wed Aug 16 18:49:25 UTC 2006 

[ I replied to this email already but it didn't work because of my server ]

On Mon, August 14, 2006 7:12 pm, Rick Stevens wrote:
> 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?

Yes, that worked as advertised.  Okay, my solution to all the submit.cf/mc
issues was the line in submit.mc: FEATURE(`msp', `[127.0.0.1]')dnl
My brain-damaged part assumed it was the same as a similar line in sendmail.mc
that MUST be commented out for email to work outside the network. Well, this
line is the opposite. It MUST be there for email to work INSIDE the network.

Removing my dnl and doing make -C /etc/mail;service sendmail restart started
everything working. Well almost...

>
>>
>> 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.

These files quit happening once I got submit.mc straightened out (see above).
I used the following line of code to get them up again (from within
/var/spool/mqueue):

for i in "ls k*"; do sendmail -v -qI$i -d11; done

>
>> >
>> >
>> >> 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.

You better check to see if your toes are still there... You've been quiet for
a day or so. Should someone check your heartrate just to be sure?

>
>> 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!

Yes, 8.0 to FC4. It's come up smoothly, other than one final annoyance, which
I'll post separately.

Karl

>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> - 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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-- 
karl
     _/  _/      _/      _/_/_/       ____________   __o
    _/ _/       _/      _/    _/     ____________  _-\<._
   _/_/        _/      _/_/_/                     (_)/ (_)
  _/ _/       _/      _/           ......................
 _/   _/ arl _/_/_/  _/ earson    KarlP at ourldsfamily.com
---
Senior Consulting Sys/DB Analyst
http://consulting.ourldsfamily.com
---
 My Thoughts on Terrorism In America right after 9/11/2001:
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---
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