OT?: Emailing from within filepro

[Bill Vermillion]

[I sent this and it was stuck in queue as aldridgeinc.com is timing
out.  I thought I had sent this to the list, but I've sucked it
from the mqueue directory and send it to the list.]


On Wed, May 26, 2004 at 04:53:24PM -0500, Tom Aldridge thus spoke:
> This is odd:

> >From the command line: cat /tmp/vacations | /usr/sbin/sendmail -s "Vacation
> Requests" tla at aldridgeinc.com

> Gives an email without a subject but not other errors that I am
> aware of.

The only -s option in sendmail that I see is used in the 'noise' in
the sendmail.cf file.   

> From the command line: cat /tmp/vacations | mail -s "Vacation Requests"
> tla at aldridgeinc.com

> Works perfectly.

In the above you used 'mail' and not sendmail.  mail does have an
option of -s for subject along with options for cc and bcc and
others.  Then the program 'mail' passes what it has constrcuted to
sendmail.

'mail' is the original very crude user interface to the mail
subsystems.  Programs such as mutt, pine, elm, cetera have been
constructed to replace that. 

It appears you are confusing 'mail' the user interface, with
'sendmail' the program the delivers mail from machine to machine
so the   mail -s   will work,   but sendmail -s   will not.

> >From within filePro: cat /tmp/vacations | /usr/sbin/sendmail
> >-s "Vacation
>
> Requests" tla at aldridgeinc.com

> Gives an email without a subject and echoed to screen is:

> /home/filepro/dead.letter... Saved message in /home/filepro/dead.letter

Failed mail is stored in dead.letter so you can retreive it if
needed, and then send it along properly.


> >From within filePro:    cat /tmp/vacations | mail -s "Vacation Requests"
> tla at aldridgeinc.com

> Gives a proper email but echos the following to screen:

> WARNING: RunAsGid for MSP ignored, check group ids (egid=51, want=524)

That says that the program is not running as SGID [set group ID] and the
effective group ID is 51 [the group that it IS running as] but it
really wants to run as  group number 524.

> 
> The owner and group names on the www.brandonhutchinson.com/
> RunAsGid_for_MSP_ignored_error.html link (which I did check out this morning
> before posting) are significantly different than my same files.
> 
> Further, grep smmsp /etc/passwd /etc/group
> displayes the following:

> /etc/passwd:smmsp:x:524:524::/home/smmsp:/bin/bash
> /etc/group:root:x:0:root,smmsp
> /etc/group:mail:::mail,smmsp
> /etc/group:smmsp:x:524:

> Can anyone offer more assistance with this additional information?

The smmsp group is the group for the 'sendmail submission user'.
Current sendmail run in two pieces, one as the 'submission' side
and the other as the 'receive' side.

This means that you have 4 startup modes in sendmail

1 - send and receive mail
2 - receive only
3 - send only
4 - don't run sendmail at all.

A grep for 'mail' in the above files would show the 'receive'
GID/UID.

This could be a configuration problem, or it could be that some
permissions aren't correct, that perhaps the SGID/SUID permissions
have been changed.  Performing something like a chmod 777 <program>
on one that maybe started with a 4755 permission might do that.

I've seen instances where people blindly change permissions when
things don't work correctly thinking that a chmod 777 will fix
things.  Depending on what they changed it will break things.

I only point this out as an example of why this may be happening, 
as there are far too many variants involved that can't be guessed
at and the system would need to be looked at.

Put in a stndard mail user program where you have 'mail' above and
all might work.  However if you keep getting those RunAsGID errors
it could easily be permission settings on the executables.


Bill
-- 
Bill Vermillion - bv @ wjv . com