I've been a Linux admin off/on for about 2 years at work working with other O/S'es at the same time. Have been a UNIX admin for about 20 years so I'm not a newb by any means. But this one has me stumped as I can't see any reason for it.

Situation - a non-root user tries to send email and then receives an error:

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sendmail -s "Test" joe@somewhere.org < (some text file)
WARNING: RunAsUser for MSP ignored, check group ids (egid=100, want=51)
can not chdir(/var/spool/clientmqueue/): Permission denied
Program mode requires special privileges, e.g., root or TrustedUser.

where 100 is the userID sending the email and 51 is the userID of smmsp.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

Here's what I have on this server:

# cat /etc/redhat-release
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server release 6.5 (Santiago)

# rpm -qa | grep -i mail
mailcap-2.1.31-2.el6.noarch
sendmail-8.14.4-8.el6.x86_64
libreport-plugin-mailx-2.0.9-19.el6.x86_64
procmail-3.22-25.1.el6_5.1.x86_64
mailx-12.4-7.el6.x86_64


# ls -ld *queue
drwxrwx---. 2 smmsp smmsp 3559424 Jan 23 09:40 clientmqueue
drwx------. 2 root mail 4096 Jun 17 2010 mqueue

sendmail itself (from the final link, and yes, all the links are correct):

# ls -l /usr/sbin/sendmail.sendmail
-rwxr-sr-x. 1 root smmsp 833512 Jun 17 2010 /usr/sbin/sendmail.sendmail


From passwd and group:

# grep smmsp /etc/passwd /etc/group
/etc/passwd:smmsp:x:51:51::/var/spool/mqueue:/sbin/nologin
/etc/group:smmsp:x:51:

resolv.conf is also correct.


And finally from the sendmail and submit config files:

# grep smmsp submit.cf sendmail.cf
submit.cf:O RunAsUser=smmsp
submit.cf:O TrustedUser=smmsp
[root@<server_name> mail]# grep RunAsUser submit.cf sendmail.cf
submit.cf:O RunAsUser=smmsp
sendmail.cf:#O RunAsUser=sendmail

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So everything looks as it should.

I did a ton of searches all day yesterday trying to figure this out and they all say that it's a perms issue with either sendmail itself or the queue directories. As you can see, they are all correct. So what gives? Why the error?

Any help will be greatly appreciated.

Anyone have anything?

Over 350 views and nothing?

These are prod systems and I need this fixed.

OK, since this didn't seem to have a fix without opening a ticket with RH, I went back and double-checked the req's from the application folks. There was NO documented requirement to have sendmail installed to start with. They only required it in conf calls for setup. So, I removed it, installed postfix and viola! Problem solved.

If I had good req's to start with and they didn't insist on sendmail during conf calls this wouldn't have even been an issue.

We would all lead happier and easier lives if we just didn't have any users to deal with... ;-)