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Re: sendmail not reading .forward file

1999-10-07 12:46:04
At 1:53 PM -0500 10/7/99, Philip Guenther wrote:
Fred Terry <pfterry(_at_)netopia(_dot_)com> writes:
At 12:14 PM -0500 10/7/99, Philip Guenther wrote:
You may find messages like the following:

Oct  7 12:13:00 solen.gac.edu sendmail[8776]: MAA08776: forward
/Net/solen/home/g/u/guenther/.forward: Group writable directory

Yep, I'm getting one of those lines for each .forward rule in the
Sendmail.cf file:

O ForwardPath=$z/.forward:$z/.forward.$w+$h:$z/.forward+$h:$z/.forward.$w

But I haven't been able to determine which directory it's
complaining about. The permissions are

-rw-r--r--   1 pfterry  staff         44 Oct  7 09:14 .forward

drwxr-xr-x  33 pfterry  other       3072 Oct  7 09:13 ./

drwxr-xr-x   2 pfterry  staff        512 Oct  6 22:29 .procmail/

The mail gets delivered to my mailbox without any filtering.
Looks like I'm running Sendmail 8.7 on a Solaris 2.7 Ultra.

At this point, I know the answer is going to become so
obvious that my forehead will have a large, red hand print.

Check each directory from your home directory to the root directory
and make sure none of them are group writable.  For example, a stock
Solaris 7 system has /usr group-writable (!).  If you have to change the
permissions on any 'system' directories (directories that were created
during the install of Solaris), then you should edit that directory's
entry in /var/sadm/install/contents to show the new value.  Otherwise,
the next time you install a package or patch, the system with nicely,
'correct' the permissions to match the entry in that file.


Philip,

Bingo! (as they say here in the States) Changing the permissions
on /export in the /export/home/pfterry hierarchy solved the problem.
Why would Sun do this? That change allowed sendmail to do its work
and generated complaints from my .forward file that the shell
wasn't vaild. A quick trip to /etc with "which tcsh csh sh bash > shells"
solved that problem. Now I'm gleefully filtering spam into the
bit bucket.

Many thanks.

pf
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Fred Terry, QA Engineer                    pfterry(_at_)netopia(_dot_)com
785.843.8101                    http://members.aol.com/pfterry


70. Write texts that undermine their own authority.
from Life's Little Deconstruction Book