Local users cannot send mail from command line or cronjobs

jonken · 01-06-2008, 07:19 AM

I have a server running Lenny and have a problem in that users are unable to send mail from scripts or the cl

joem@joeshome:~$ mail -s "test" someone@somewhere.net
Fatal: no entropy gathering module detected
Aborted

Adding a user to the sudoers with permission to x /usr/bin/mail and then running the above command using sudo works OK so it's obviously a permissions problem.

joem@joeshome:~$ ls -l /usr/bin/mail
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 125240 2006-12-04 11:31 /usr/bin/mail
joem@joeshome:~$ ls -l /dev/urandom
crw-rw-rw- 1 root root 1, 9 2008-01-01 14:32 /dev/urandom

This is really annoying as cron jobs running as users other than root throw an error.

Has anyone any more suggestions where I can look?

Regards, Joe

trickykid · 01-07-2008, 05:26 PM

What happens if a regular user does cat /dev/urandom? Do you see a bunch of binary looking characters scrolling across the screen or is it sitting there doing nothing? Permissions of urandom is ok, only needs read access at minimal. I've seen it as cr--r--r-- or crw-rw-rw like you have it.

jonken · 01-08-2008, 01:49 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by trickykid

What happens if a regular user does cat /dev/urandom? Do you see a bunch of binary looking characters scrolling across the screen or is it sitting there doing nothing? Permissions of urandom is ok, only needs read access at minimal. I've seen it as cr--r--r-- or crw-rw-rw like you have it.

cat /dev/urandom works OK for regular users. There must be some other process somewhere with too restrictive permissions. I've spent hours googling for this but drawn a blank.

Regards, Joe

jonken · 01-10-2008, 04:29 PM

Having spent many, many hours on this I decided to take drastic action and installed bsd-mailx. This removed /usr/bin/mail but created a link to mailx and now all works as it should. Still don't know why this didn't work first off.