Quick rundown: We had a Linux guru at my office, but he recently left. The boss made me the new Linux guy (he figured that since I do M$ windows admin, I would be able to do linux admin too...wrong)

I believe we are on a really old version of Mandrake (non-GUI login shows 1.0.1, assuming this isn't 10.1 which is their latest). I need to set up mail accounts for two new employees, but I have no idea which mail app is running on the server.

I located the mailboxes for the users, and they are in /home/mailer/users. In there are the directories for every user, and in each of those directories is /cur, /new, and /tmp.

How can I find out which mail program is creating these folders? I ran "ps -A" and it says qmail-send, qmail-lspawn, and qmail-clean are all running, so the obvious answer to me is QMAIL. However, I can't seem to create any new accounts. In fact, none of the Q-mail commands that I found online seem to be working.

I'm a true newbie, so can anyone tell me how to create these accounts, or how to tell which mail app is running?


Eh, I just killed the mail server. I think I corrupted the password file. I looked in it to see if thats where the logins were kept, and I *may* have hit save on accident (even though I didn't think I changed anything). Now everyone is telling me they can't log into our POP3 server. How do I reset the passwords!? OOPS!

Thanks!

My configurations of qmail use system passwords and logins, but it can be configured in a number of ways. Look for qmail start command - it should have it all. Look in /var/qmail/supervise for script file 'run'. Do you have it?

Passwords: How does second column (they are divided by : chars) look like? Is there 'x' for all users? If so, the passwords are in /etc/shadow, also second column. To reset password remove it (the column content) so lines look like
username::12831:0:99999:7:::

Thanks for the quick response...

Here's what I have. I do have the script file 'run' located in that directory. Here are its contents:

#!/bin/sh
exec /usr/local/bin/softlimit -m 5000000
/usr/local/bin/tcpserver -v -R -H -l 0 0 110 /var/qmail/bin/qmail-popup/mail.ourservers.net /usr/bin/checkvpw /var/qmail/bin/qmail-pop3d MailDir

As for that shadow directory, it doesn't seem to exist.

I have realized that by viewing the passwd.cdb file in the /home/mailer directory, I inadvertently screwed up the file. I think I may have accidently saved to that file without meaning to. Can it be restored or repaired?

Any help will be greatly appreciated!

/usr/bin/checkvpw - that's the program for checking passwords used by your mailserver. Look for its docs (online or try man checkvpw) to see which file it uses. passwd.cdb isn't normal password file - I gues it's a copy for mailserver. You can only break it if you edit it, nit by viewing. Look if there's passwd.cdb~ or passwd.cdb.backup - most editors make backup copies. There's a big chance that one was created.

Thanks for your help.

After doing a bunch of research about our server here, I discovered we're using some program called vmailmgr. I looked up its online user guide and simply recreated everyone's email accounts and passwords. I was hoping for an easier solution, but at least it saved my butt. Apparently, vmailmgr uses that passwd.cdb file, and if you corrupt it there is no way to repair it. Ooops. At least I know better now.

I just figured I'd post this in case anyone else has this problem in the future.