[techtalk] problems with Sendmail

[Bad Mojo]

On Thu, 3 Feb 2000, Andrew Kirkpatrick wrote:
> On Wed, 02 Feb 2000, you wrote:
> > I hopw someone can help me: I'm not very experienced in Linux and I'm 
> > taking in charge a Sendmail server. Lately I'm having always the same 
> > problem with users very often: a certain user cannot receive his mail, and 
> > when I try to login with this user, the message (last login.......you have 
> > mail, etc) appears for a second and then the prompt before logging comes 
> > back, and if I log in as root and make su username, I receive the following 
> > message: shel-init: could not get current directory. The only solution I 
> > find is renaming his var/spool/mail to keep the messages, remove the user 
> > and then create it again, and then it works normally but I would like to 
> > find out the problem...

I may be way off here, but it seems like this user account may not have a
properly defined shell? I say that because it appears that a normal login
from the prompt or an su yeild similar problems of not finding a proper
shell. The end of each line in the passwd file states what shell the user
gets when they connect to the system. It should be something similar to
/bin/csh or /bin/bash. If it is /dev/null or something that may not
provide a proper shell, that could cause the two symptoms I see above.

On a side note. I forgot to read ahead and ended up answering a question
that got answered by everyone and their brother it seems. Ugh, sorry bout
that.

Bad Mojo <RPS Figurehead, ThinkPad Pope, SysAdmin>
ICQ:4722638|AIM:BadMojo000|http://www.rps.net/mojo
"When I need to I hit people with the largest weapon I can find: the Earth."


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