[Pkg-exim4-users] exim4 not starting by default in lenny

[Lukas Baxa]

Hello,

I installed the exim4 package under debian lenny, but the daemon doesn't
start. In /var/log/mail.err, I can find following:

Mar  15 21:30:07 ... exim[11948]: 2010-03-15 21:30:07 exim 4.69 daemon 
started: pid=11948, -q30m, listening for SMTP on [127.0.0.1]:25
Mar  15 21:30:07 ... exim[11948]: 2010-03-15 21:30:07 Cannot open main 
log file "/var/log/exim4/mainlog": Permission denied: euid=102 egid=107
Mar  15 21:30:07 ... exim[11948]: exim: could not open panic log - 
aborting: see message(s) above

So I checked the access to /var/log/exim4/mainlog and I found that
/var/log is not accessible for the Debian-exim user (in fact to anyone
who isn't root or isn't a member of the root group).

 > ls -ld /var/log
drwxr-x--- 7 root root 3072 Mar 16 20:25 /var/log/

This problem can be solved by setting the permissions to 755 to 
/var/log, but I suppose the access is prohibited because of security
reasons. So I changed the ownership of var log to root:adm

 > chown root:adm /var/log

and added the user Debian-exim to the adm group:

 > usermod -G adm Debian-exim

After that exim4 started without problems.

Shouldn't the default configuration of exim4 be such so that this server
starts under lenny after it is configured by running dpkg-reconfigure 
exim4-config? This problem seems quite strange to me to occur in the 
stable distibution.

Thanks,

Lukas