sendmail error messages

[Charles Swiger]

On Mar 27, 2006, at 3:26 PM, gs_stoller at juno.com wrote:
> Mar 25 23:28:15  sendmail[1181]: k2Q3wGR00214: SYSERR(root): hash  
> map "Alias0":
> unsafe map file /etc/mail/aliases.db: World writable directory
>
> 	It repeats with IDs  1298 ,  1328 ,  1357 ,  1439 ,  1466 , &   
> 1491  in the brackets after 'sendmail'.  What significance is there  
> to these numbers?

Those of the process IDs of new sendmail child processes which start  
up and abort.

> 	I checked  /etc/mail/aliases.db  with 'll -d' and got
> -rw-r--r--  1 root  wheel  32768 Jun 12  2001 /etc/mail/aliases.db
> and as you can see it is not World writable.  What is going on, and  
> how
> do I stop these messages?

See this section of /usr/src/contrib/sendmail/README:

+-----------------------+
| DIRECTORY PERMISSIONS |
+-----------------------+

Sendmail often gets blamed for many problems that are actually the
result of other problems, such as overly permissive modes on  
directories.
For this reason, sendmail checks the modes on system directories and
files to determine if they can be trusted.  For sendmail to run without
complaining, you MUST execute the following command:

         chmod go-w / /etc /etc/mail /usr /var /var/spool /var/spool/ 
mqueue
         chown root / /etc /etc/mail /usr /var /var/spool /var/spool/ 
mqueue


...there's also a DontBlameSendmail option which disables the  
security checks, but you're better off fixing the issue directly.

(You could also check out mtree.)

-- 
-Chuck