An exim cough.

[rvclayton@acm.org (R. Clayton)]

Sometime during the past few days exim4 (4.52 #1 built 02-Jul-2005 06:12:03) on
a debian testing system (Linux UlanBator 2.4.27-speakup #1 Fri Feb 25 15:43:38
EST 2005 i686 GNU/Linux) stopped sending mail to my isp.  After poking around a
bit with -d, I found smtp authentication was failing because the
/etc/exim4/passwd.client read was failing due to permission problems.  The
permissions were

  ul ls -l /etc/exim4/passwd.client
  -rw-r-----  1 root root 241 2005-05-02 18:32 /etc/exim4/passwd.client

and changing them to

  ul ls -l /etc/exim4/passwd.client
  -rw-r--r--  1 root root 241 2005-05-02 20:55 /etc/exim4/passwd.client

fixed the problem.

However, it is unclear to me why permissions would flip; I'm also thinking my
solution is not the best possible one.  What could be an explanation for this
problem, and what are some possible better solutions for it?

Notes:

  1 Outgoing mail was working Monday (August 8) and Tuesday; it failed sometime
    Wednesday.

  2 The system is upgraded weekly early Sunday morning.