[Mailman-Users] smrsh + mailman = "unknown mailer error 2", but not always...
Luca Polo
jake at gest.unipd.it
Mon May 24 16:44:45 CEST 1999
Hallo everyone,
this is my first post on this forum, and although I find Mailman a very
good piece of software, I already have a puzzling question (puzzling for
me, at least...).
I've just installed mailman 1.0rc1 under Solaris 7 + sendmail 8.9.3 +
python 1.5.2, and I've experienced the same behaviour John-David Childs has
described a while ago (thread "Desperation Time! :)", which I've found in
the May archive).
Strangely enough, I got this error after the first install, but mailman al-
so reported an error in the mail GID I had chosen, so I reinstalled it from
scratch with the right GID, and it worked fine. For a while.
Today, mail delivering stopped working again, with the same error. I've
made some tests, and at last I recompiled the wrapper with the GID_MISMATCH
macro in src/common.h redefined to "99" instead of the default "2" (I cho-
osed "99" randomly, just to see if "mailer error 2" would have been trans-
formed in "mailer error 99", or something more interesting :-); BTW, smrsh
*is* correctly configured, with a symlink to ~mailman/mail/wrapper in
/usr/adm/sm.bin, etc.).
I then just copied only the "wrapper" binary to ~mailman/mail and restored
its permissions to -rwx-r-sr-x, leaving everything else untouched (I double
checked that owner, group and permission were the same before and after the
test; I also saved a backup copy of the old executable).
Well, I didn't expect it to work, but it worked, and this is quite a
nonsense, since it looked "obvious" that there was no relationship between
GID_MISMATCH and the error code returned by smrsh (at least, not after
having correctly confiugred the mail GID). I also recompiled smrsh, expli-
citly adding /usr/local/bin in its internal PATH, just to see if it was a
problem of finding python, but nothing changed... Looking at smrsh code
shows nothing interesting: it just performs a few "sanity checks" on the
command string passed by sendmail and if it's all OK, it just spawns a real
shell which in turn executes the wrapper, etc.; and the wrapper is not much
more complex than smrsh...
So, I just returned to the old wrapper (GID_MISMATCH = 2) and the old
smrsh, and everything keeps working fine, but I'm still wondering *what*
caused this strange behaviour... At a first glance, it seems that just
replacing the "old" wrapper with a "new" (identical!) one, is enough to
"unblock" something somewhere, but the Big Question is "what and where?".
Any hint?
Best regards,
Luca Polo.
--
/ Luca Polo : Luca.Polo at gest.unipd.it || Dipartimento di Tecnica e \
| System & network administrator || Gestione dei Sistemi Industriali |
\ http://www.gest.unipd.it/~jake || Universita` di Padova -- Italy /
More information about the Mailman-Users
mailing list