Solaris/sendmail 8.6.10 -- No group id of 'mail'

[mindframe.com SysAdmin]

I have recently gotten sendmail 8.6.10 on my Sun IPX running Solaris 2.4.

Even when I had the Sun distribution of sendmail 5.4.x (or so)...I used to
get the message:

mail: No group id of 'mail'

I realize that all accounts that the /bin/mail account works with must have the
group id set to 'mail' and must be writable by group 'mail'...I have done this
..believe me...you have never typed 'chgrp mail' 'chmod 550' as much as I have
in the last 2 days :^)

I used to just ignore the message because everything worked fine. However, for
reasons not worth mentioning I NEED to upgrade to v8...and now...Houston, I
have a problem.

(I also used to get the message:
sendmail[(pid)]: gethostbyaddr() failed
but that seems to have ceased while the following occurs.

Here is the output of 'sendmail -v root < /dev/null' (not to insult any gurus
out there...but to clarify...send nothing to myself in verbose mode) I got:

mail: No group id of 'mail'
root... unknown mailer error 1
Saving message in /dead.letter
/dead.letter... Can't create output: No such file or directory
mail: No group id of 'mail'
root... unknown mailer error 1
postmaster... aliased to root
mail: No group id of 'mail'
root... unknown mailer error 1

It appears to me that /bin/mail is unable to write to ANYTHING anymore...

AHHHHHHHHHH!!!! Won't someone save me from my own living hell?!?!?!?!

I can't confirm this but I think that /bin/mail (and other other tools needing
cannot write to my mqueue either...

Thanks in advance for all your help...by the way...don't bother trying to
e-mail me...IT DOESN'T WORK :^(

Paul A. Weier
System Administrator (and a pathetic one obviously :^)
mindframe.com
St. Paul, MN
http://www.mindframe.com/ (please, leave comments...I won't cry :^)

[mindframe.com SysAdmin]

To amend my previous letter...I have now discovered that just generally my
permissions are screwed. I have set ALL my permissions on all my relavent
files to those suggested in the bat book (sendmail:O'Reilly) and still to no
avail.

I get all kinds of good messages like:

NOQUEUE: SYSERR(daemon): cannot chdir(/var/spool/mqueue): Permission denied
(drwx------ 2 root bin 512 Nov 29 19:27 mqueue is my current mod)

and

NOQUEUE: SYSERR(plebe): /etc/mail/sendmail.cf: line 0: cannot open: Permission
denied
(-rw-r----- 1 root other 20427 Nov 29 16:49 sendmail.cf is mod)

What am I doing wrong...I could just open up all the permissions and then I
wouldn't have a problem...but I am not about to open up the mail so every one
on my box can cruise in and read each others mail.

Out going mail (that doesn't get temp stored in the mqueue...cuz of the s
option that I have set goes out fine...it is just that sendmail can't do
anything on the harddrive/locally cuz it has no permissions...

Well, I am going to go an cry now...I hope I have an answer in the morning.

paul weier, mindframe.com
http://www.mindframe.com/

[sanmartin.j...@gmail.com]

Please check the permissions of the following files:

/etc/passwd
/etc/shadow
/etc/group

They should be like this:
-r-------- 1 root sys 1294 Feb 14 10:11 /etc/shadow
-rw-r--r-- 1 root sys 797 Feb 14 08:41 /etc/group
-rw-r--r-- 1 root sys 2752 Feb 14 07:09 /etc/passwd

Regards,
JS