Gentoo Archives: gentoo-user

From: Walter Dnes <waltdnes@××××××××.org>
To: Gentoo Users List <gentoo-user@l.g.o>
Subject: [gentoo-user] Why does procmail need to know what my mailer is?
Date: Wed, 12 Oct 2011 15:07:15
Message-Id: 20111012150603.GD8613@waltdnes.org
1 I was emerging system and world on my laptop after a gcc upgrade. I
2 "windowshaded" the xterm on my desktop that was ssh'd into the laptop.
3 All that was visible was the bar at the top of the window, with the
4 title indicating that emerge was working on procmail, item 85 of 95. I
5 went away for a couple of hours, touched the shift key to wake up the
6 screen, and saw that emerge was still on procmail... WTF!?!?
7
8 I opened the xterm and saw that the procmail build had an interactive
9 prompt, waiting for an answer from me...
10
11 > Could not find any mailer. It should be a mailer accepting at least
12 > one plain destination address as its only argument (any sendmail
13 > compatible mailer will do), and the mail-to-be-sent on stdin.
14 > What is your mailer called? (You can override this in config.h)
15
16 I replied "oogabooga" and it went on its merry way. I use ssmtp, but
17 I've made 1 tweak to my system. Note the following *DIRECTORIES*...
18
19 [aa1][root][~] ll /usr/bin/sendmail
20 total 28
21 drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 72 Aug 12 19:07 .
22 drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 28240 Oct 12 06:36 ..
23 -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 Aug 12 19:07 .keep
24 [aa1][root][~] ll /usr/sbin/sendmail
25 total 2
26 drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 72 Aug 12 19:08 .
27 drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 2416 Oct 12 02:23 ..
28 -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 Aug 12 19:08 .keep
29 [aa1][root][~] ll /usr/lib64/sendmail
30 total 27
31 drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 72 Aug 12 19:08 .
32 drwxr-xr-x 46 root root 27464 Oct 12 02:26 ..
33 -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 Aug 12 19:08 .keep
34 [aa1][root][~]
35
36 My most embarressing incident involving linux was one day when I added
37 a cron job, and it started sending log messages to "root". Back then, I
38 didn't know that ssmtp made a "sendmail" link, let alone 3 of them.
39 ssmtp did its thing, and pushed the messages for "root" to my ISP's MTA,
40 which forwarded them to my ISP's root inbox. "They were not amused".
41
42 After a few attempts, I finished the game of whack-a-mole and killed
43 all the symlinks, and made sure that it would never happen again. I
44 addition to configuring ssmtp.conf to send "root" messages to myself, I
45 also made the above directories to prevent symlinks being constructed.
46 Who knows what other programs send mail on a whim.
47
48 This is the first time I've had this interactive prompt happen with
49 procmail. What gives?
50
51 --
52 Walter Dnes <waltdnes@××××××××.org>

Replies

Subject Author
Re: [gentoo-user] Why does procmail need to know what my mailer is? Mick <michaelkintzios@×××××.com>