sendmail not sending or receiving email
 

Hi there --

We have Sendmail 8.13.1 running on an HP-UX 10.20 secure system. The daemon appears to be running but e-mails are not being send or received on the server. I did a check of the /var/adm/syslog/mail.log file and discovered the following entry:

unable to write pid to /etc/mail/sendmail.pid: Permission denied

How would I go about correcting this issue? Thanks.

Simply give the user that's running the sendmail daemon write permission on the file
/etc/mail/sendmail.pid.
You can do this via "chmod".

So:
-check your sendmail config and /etc/passwd to know which user sendmail runs under;
-Type:
ls -l /etc/mail/sendmail.pid
To know the permissions on the file, who owns it, etc.
-change the permissions with chmod so that the user sendmail runs under is given write access (either
by owning the file or via the group permissions). Don't make the file just "rwxrwxrwx", since PID (process ID) files are used by the system to control services (eg start/stop/restart them). A corrupted PID can thus lead
to a broken service.
In general, it's a bad idea to make any system file "world-writable".

If you want more help, post the following:
-user sendmail runs under
-output of the ls -l command above