Sendmail configuration issues after upgrading Debian 2
I followed this tutorial to upgrade my linode instance from Debian 8 to Stable. In the wake of that upgrade, I've had several errors/issues with sendmail.
$ which sendmaildoesn't return anything. I do have sendmail installed. It's at/usr/sbin/sendmail.Sendmail's permissions are as follows:
$ ls -la /usr/sbin/sendmail lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 26 Jul 17 12:41 /usr/sbin/sendmail -> /etc/alternatives/sendmailThe link (
/etc/alternatives/sendmail) is highlighted in red.When I try to send a test email with
sudo echo "Subject: sendmail test" | /usr/sbin/sendmail -v me@address.comI get the following error:can not write to queue directory /var/spool/mqueue-client/ (RunAsGid=115, required=0): Permission deniedThat directory's permissions are:
$ ls -la /var/spool/mqueue-client drwxrwxr-x 2 root root 4096 Sep 15 2018 mqueue-client
So, I obviously have some sort of permission/ownership issue, but I also think there's something else going on given items 1 and 2. I need to be able to receive emails from the system's OSSEC and Fail2ban, so I can't really go without a working email client/server. I'm just not sure how to fix these issues.
My sendmail was simply installed with $ sudo apt-get install sendmail sendmail-bin, so it came direct from Debian's repos, which is why I'm a bit baffled by these issues… I assumed that whatever configuration was needed would be handled by the installation process.
1 Reply
Hey there,
Inline distribution upgrades frequently cause breaking impacts and other kinds of system errors. We see that you had some issues with apt-get in your other Community Post.
First, we'd like to mention that while we provide guides with step-by-step instructions for inline upgrades, we highly recommend Creating a Disk with a Linux Distribution Installed and moving your data over to it. This method significantly reduces breaking impacts and risks to data. It's not to late to use that here if you continue to encounter issues with your services or packages.
As the Sendmail installation needed to be cleared and forced to get running again, we recommend reconfiguring Sendmail like a fresh install and then adapting any changes after that to track change impacts.
We also recommend viewing the locations of your Sendmail files as they may have changed due to the new distribution:
find -L . -name "*sendmail*"
You can learn more about the Sendmail package for Buster, here. We hope that helps.
Sincerely,
Tara T
Linode Support Team