[techtalk] More problems...

[Michelle Murrain]

On Monday 30 April 2001 02:28 pm, James Sutherland wrote:
> On Mon, 30 Apr 2001, Michelle Murrain wrote:
> > I hope you guys don't get sick of my questions...
>
> Hey, that's what the list's for!
>
> > I have run into a wierd problem - on this box, I'm running debian woody.
> > All of a sudden (no, it probably went along with an apt-get update,
> > apt-get upgrade) sendmail is unable to read or rebuild the aliases
> > database. I get the following error message when I run "newaliases":
> >
> > Cannot open hash database /etc/mail/aliases.db: Invalid argument
> > WARNING: cannot open alias database /etc/mail/aliases
> > Cannot create database for alias file /etc/mail/aliases
>
> OK - something wrong in /etc/mail, then.
>
> Try "ls -ld /etc/mail", and "ls -l /etc/mail", and mail the output here -
> it looks as if the permissions on those files or that directory are wrong?
> (Either that, or the directory has been deleted.)
>
> Don't panic, anyway - it's probably just a permissions problem. (You are
> running these commands as root??)

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.

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