[comp.sys.sun] Bizare problem with sendmail

roy@uunet.uu.net (Roy Smith) (01/11/89)

A week or two ago, mail stopped working on some of our SunOS-3.5.2
systems.  We have 2 mostly identical file servers, with about 8 diskless
clients each.  We run the stock sun sendmail with the "debug" binary patch
on both, but not the sun-supplied sendmail.cf files.  Everything used to
work fine until one server, and the clients it serves, went out to lunch.

The basic symptoms are as follows:  If you send local mail, the file in
/usr/spool/mail/ ends up being owned by the sender.  If you send mail that
gets delivered over the network (with the faulty machine on the receiving
end) the spool file ends up being owned by deamon.  It looks for all the
world like sendmail has stopped being suid root, but:

wombat> ls -l /usr/lib/sendmail
-r-sr-x--x  1 root       139264 Nov  9 17:03 /usr/lib/sendmail*

which is exactly the same result you get on the other (working) server.
Sum(1) shows the same results for the two /usr/lib/sendmail files and for
the /usr/lib/sendmail.cf files too.  Sun tech support can't figure out
what's going on.  Any ideas?

Roy Smith, System Administrator
Public Health Research Institute
{allegra,philabs,cmcl2,rutgers}!phri!roy -or- phri!roy@uunet.uu.net