The mailing list for listmasters using Sympa

["Chris Andrews" <address@concealed>]

I had the same problem.  It is because the newer version of sendmail only
allow root to update the aliases files.

I added this to the Sympa Wiki, but it seems to have gotten lost in the move
to the new Sympa.org site.  Lucky for me we use the Doku wiki here, so here
is the info again if some one wants to put it back up there:

===== Getting sympa to run the aliases update as root =====

In the newer versions of sendmail only root can run the newaliases command
-- so I needed to get sympa to run the aliases updater as root.  I based
this solution on the fcgi wrapper solution.  This is based on the folders
and files name in my Sympa install, yours may be different.

I was able to get it to work by moving /var/sympa/sbin/alias_manager.pl to
/var/sympa/sbin/alias_manager_sudo_wrapper.pl, then I created a new PERl
script /var/sympa/sbin/allias_wrapper.pl:

<code perl>
#!/usr/bin/perl

exec '/usr/bin/sudo', '-u', 'root',
'/home/sympa/sbin/alias_manager_sudo_wrapper.pl',
"$ARGV[0]","$ARGV[1]","$ARGV[2]","$ARGV[3]";
/var/sympa/sbin/
</code>

My PERL skillz are weak, so some one might have a better way of passing the
arguments in better way (using @ARGV resulted in all the arguments becoming
one instead of descreate arguments when they are passed to
alias_manager_sudo_wrapper.pl).

You need to make sure your sympa aliases file has the following perms:

-rw-r--r--   1 sympa root   6003 Jan  8 12:05 sympa_aliases

Sendmail will not like it if the file is group or everyone writable, but
does not seem to care who actaully owns it.

I also made the following change to /etc/sudoers file:

sympa host=(root) NOPASSWD:/home/sympa/sbin/alias_manager_sudo_wrapper.pl

I also made sure that the sympa user is not a nologin user.  It needs to be
able have shell access to be able to sudo. 



---
 Chris Andrews
 Boston College
 Collaboration Team


-----Original Message-----
From: Thomas Berry [mailto:address@concealed] 
Sent: Thursday, April 05, 2007 11:56 AM
To: address@concealed
Subject: [sympa-users] Re: updating aliases


False alarm.   setting permissions to 4755 did not work.  Neither did 6755.

Any ideas?

Thomas


I found the answer.

*nix permissions on ~sympa/bin/aliaswrapper must be sticky with chmod 4755.

Thomas

Thomas Berry wrote:
> revision: 5.3b.3
>
>   I'm trying to resolve a problem I'm having with sympa's ability to
> manage aliases.  The sympa process is able to update aliases when it
> adds a list's aliases as part of the automatic list creation process.
>
> Apr  4 13:29:05 dev-list sympa(creation)[8681]: admin::install_aliases :
> Aliases installed successfully
>
>
>   But, when wwsympa is used to remove close a list, it fails to execute
> newaliases:
>
>
> Apr  5 08:12:24 dev-list wwsympa[12127]: Failed to remove aliases ;
> status 6 :
>
>
>   Both Sympa and Apache are running as user: sympa.
>
> Thomas

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