[techtalk] More problems...

[Michelle Murrain]

On Monday 30 April 2001 04:06 pm, James Sutherland wrote:
> On Mon, 30 Apr 2001, Michelle Murrain wrote:
> > Wish it were simply a permissions issue. All of the files in /etc/mail
> > are there, and thier permissions haven't changed (they are all owned by
> > root, and chmod 744)
> >
> > It's a much wierder problem. I think that it has to do with somehow, the
> > system in general can't read or deal with DB files. I tried to do a
> > "makemap hash" in a different situation, and it barfed on me.
>
> Looks like you're being bitten by Debian bug 94103, as someone else said:
> they've changed the db libraries, and sendmail broke as a result. Not
> entirely sure of a workaround yet - have you tried renaming the current
> /etc/mail/aliases.db to another name, and rebuilding from the text file?

Thanks for the detail on the bug - I did a look at the bug reports on the 
debian website - I can't figure out whether it's fixed - it looked like 
someone had changed the sendmail package to fix it. I did another 
update/upgrade and sendmail was in the list of packages to be upgraded, but 
it didn't solve the problem. I'm still looking about for workarounds, 
although I think I'm doing OK at this point until the problem gets solved. 
I've done a bit of workarounds so that I get mail (I made new accounts where 
I just had aliases). But it's weird - I can't figure out why mailman works, 
and the plain aliases don't. (Not that I'm complaining!)

I've also tried several things - rebuilding from the text file is one, making 
a db from text on a different machine - none of them worked. 

One of the lessons I've learned is that although I'm not anywhere near a 
linux newbie (I'm not even a debian newbie - I'm pretty used to it, and have 
been using it for about 6 months now), running a non-stable version of 
debian on a box I depend on is probably not a good idea, even though I was 
interested in doing some playing around. I like debian a lot, and although I 
get really frustrated by how far behind the distro is compared to others, and 
compared to fresh releases of software (I mean, postgres is up to 7.1 and 
debian stable is still running 6.5 fer chrissakes!) it is pretty damn rock 
solid, once stable is frozen. But testing and unstable are a different 
ballgame altogether. 

Michelle
-- 
------------
Michelle Murrain, Ph.D.
President
Norwottuck Technology Resources
mpm at norwottuck.com
http://www.norwottuck.com