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

Lukas Baxa baxic-cs at seznam.cz
Wed Mar 17 20:16:07 UTC 2010


Hi,

Marc Haber wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 16, 2010 at 08:43:11PM +0100, Lukas Baxa wrote:
>> 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
> 
> Bad Idea.

Why do you think that changing the group of /var/log to adm is a bad 
idea? I do not see any problem or drawback. Many of the log files
under /var/log have the adm group, especially those which are not
world readable. And all other log files I can find under /var/log
have the owner root. Do you think some services may not be able
to access /var/log and I also cannot see them?

> 
> I don't know what went wrong on your system, this is how the
> permissions are supposed to look like:
> 
> drwxr-xr-x 47 root        root  32K 17. Mär 07:39 /var/log/
> drwxr-s---  2 Debian-exim adm  4,0K 13. Mär 13:20 /var/log/exim4/
> -rw-r-----  1 Debian-exim adm  3,9M 17. Mär 14:37 /var/log/exim4/mainlog
> -rw-r-----  1 Debian-exim adm     0 17. Mär 08:34 /var/log/exim4/paniclog
> 
> exim works fine that way.

Thanks. You're right, exim works fine that way.

> 
>> 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
> 
> It is, and exim works fine. In all cases I know. There have been rare
> reports of botched up permissions after installation, but I am much
> less than convinced that this is caused by the exim package.

I do not know why my /var/log wasn't world readable. This seems to me 
like some quite strange issue.

> Greetings
> Marc
> 

Lukas




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