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I was emerging system and world on my laptop after a gcc upgrade. I |
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"windowshaded" the xterm on my desktop that was ssh'd into the laptop. |
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All that was visible was the bar at the top of the window, with the |
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title indicating that emerge was working on procmail, item 85 of 95. I |
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went away for a couple of hours, touched the shift key to wake up the |
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screen, and saw that emerge was still on procmail... WTF!?!? |
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|
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I opened the xterm and saw that the procmail build had an interactive |
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prompt, waiting for an answer from me... |
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|
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> Could not find any mailer. It should be a mailer accepting at least |
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> one plain destination address as its only argument (any sendmail |
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> compatible mailer will do), and the mail-to-be-sent on stdin. |
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> What is your mailer called? (You can override this in config.h) |
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|
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I replied "oogabooga" and it went on its merry way. I use ssmtp, but |
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I've made 1 tweak to my system. Note the following *DIRECTORIES*... |
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|
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[aa1][root][~] ll /usr/bin/sendmail |
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total 28 |
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drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 72 Aug 12 19:07 . |
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drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 28240 Oct 12 06:36 .. |
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-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 Aug 12 19:07 .keep |
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[aa1][root][~] ll /usr/sbin/sendmail |
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total 2 |
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drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 72 Aug 12 19:08 . |
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drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 2416 Oct 12 02:23 .. |
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-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 Aug 12 19:08 .keep |
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[aa1][root][~] ll /usr/lib64/sendmail |
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total 27 |
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drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 72 Aug 12 19:08 . |
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drwxr-xr-x 46 root root 27464 Oct 12 02:26 .. |
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-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 Aug 12 19:08 .keep |
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[aa1][root][~] |
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|
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My most embarressing incident involving linux was one day when I added |
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a cron job, and it started sending log messages to "root". Back then, I |
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didn't know that ssmtp made a "sendmail" link, let alone 3 of them. |
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ssmtp did its thing, and pushed the messages for "root" to my ISP's MTA, |
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which forwarded them to my ISP's root inbox. "They were not amused". |
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|
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After a few attempts, I finished the game of whack-a-mole and killed |
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all the symlinks, and made sure that it would never happen again. I |
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addition to configuring ssmtp.conf to send "root" messages to myself, I |
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also made the above directories to prevent symlinks being constructed. |
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Who knows what other programs send mail on a whim. |
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|
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This is the first time I've had this interactive prompt happen with |
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procmail. What gives? |
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|
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-- |
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Walter Dnes <waltdnes@××××××××.org> |