Sendmail and HostStatus handling
I run sendmail 8.13.8-3 on an etch box, and am having a small problem
with configuration of HostStatus that seems to be related to how
sendmail is implemented in Debian.
If I set DAEMON_HOSTSTATS="No"; in sendmail.conf, then sendmailconfig
deletes /var/lib/sendmail/host_status, as described in relevant
documentation. However, somewhere along, sendmail is still trying to
write to that directory on the regular runs of the sendmail queues (in
my case, every 20 minutes), and I get an error
Warning: Cannot use HostStatusDirectory = /var/lib/sendmail/host_status: No such file or directory
which persists until I manually recreate the host_status directory.
On the other hand, if I set DAEMON_HOSTSTATS to "yes", I get errors that
look like:
mci_lock_host: cannot create host lock file /var/lib/sendmail/host_status/com./example: Permission denied
These errors don't happen consistently, but do turn up when sendmail
makes its scheduled runs.
In this example, the name of the box is "example.com" without a local
host name attached to the domain.
Additionally, this particular box is set up so that it has multiple
domain names, and each domain has a unique IP address. Thus,
"foobar.com" is also hosted here, with its own IP.
The peculiar thing is that this error is happening only in conjunction
with the primary hostname on the box, and there's no problems with any
of the secondaries.
The permissions on the directory are:
drwxr-s--x 3 smmta smmsp 4096 Mar 17 18:31 /var/lib/sendmail
I've done a little tinkering with ownerships and permissions, but
haven't found a combination that works.
At the moment, I have DAEMON_HOSTSTATS set to "no", because my
preference is having to manually recreate the directory, rather than
having a more constant stream of administrative mail complaining about
"cannot create host lock file".
I don't think there's any compelling reason to enable HostStatus, and I
don't think there's any significant performance difference by having it
enabled.
The preferred fix would be to find out why sendmail is trying to write
to host_status when DAEMON_HOSTSTATS is set to "no", but by the same
token, I'd be happy to leave enabled and make sure that there aren't any
write conflicts. Either solution would be fine, as long as it makes the
errors go away.
Smith
Reply to: