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majordomo problems and solutions 7 May 2000

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This article will be appended to from time to time as I encounter new and wonderful problems with majordomo. Actually, to be fair, majordomo works well for me. It's only when I start changing things, like directory permissions that I get into trouble.

Note, when you see example.org on this page, it was probably freebsddiary.org until I changed it because I was getting spam.

MAJORDOMO ABORT (mj_digest)!!

If you find this message:

Date sent:      	Sun, 7 May 2000 12:24:33 +1200 (NZST)
To:             	Majordomo-Owner@example.org
From:           	majordomo@example.org
Subject:        	MAJORDOMO ABORT (mj_digest)
Send reply to:  	majordomo@example.org

--

MAJORDOMO ABORT (mj_digest)!!

open(MSG, ">/usr/local/majordomo/lists/freebsddiary.org/digests/
                     freshports-digest/001"): Permission denied

...then I have the solution for you.

The directory in question (freshports-digests) needs execute permission. So make sure that directory is chmod u+x.

directory permissions must be correct 20 May 2000

Today I found that the FreeBSD Diary Announce mailing list was not working. In fact, the last message didn't even make it out to the list members. And no error message bounced back to me. After much searching and comparisons to working mailing lists, I found the error to be directory permissions.

The breakthough occurred when I tried to verify one of the mailing list address:

# sendmail -bv freebsddiary-announce-freebsddiary-org-outgoing  
 :include:
 /usr/local/majordomo/lists/freebsddiary.org/freebsddiary-announce
 ... Cannot open 
 /usr/local/majordomo/lists/freebsddiary.org/freebsddiary-announce:
 Permission denied

OK. That's pretty clear. Then I compared the directory permissions on the freebsddiary.org directory with the freshports.org directory:

drwxr--r-- 4 majordom majordom 1024 May 20 15:10 freebsddiary.org
drwxr-xr-x 5 majordom majordom  512 May 20 14:43 freshports.org

As you can see, freshports.org had +x on group and other. And I'm pretty sure sendmail came under other. So I did this:

chmod g+x freebsddiary.org

I tried again. Same error. OK. One more chmod:

chmod o+x freebsddiary.org

This time, the "sendmail -bv" took a long time to complete (I assume it was resolving all the email addresses on the mailing list) but it did succeed.

list owner not found 12 May 2003

I was moving some lists from one box to another and actually changing domains. In fact, I was moving the announcement list for this website from freebsddiary.org to lists.freebsddiary.org. The goal was simplification of background administration tasks. I struggled with this error for about an hour (note that I have changed the domain name to freebsddiary.org and the list name to mylist):

postfix/local[16648]: CEB6AAE4A7: to=<owner-mylist@example.org<, relay=local, delay=1, status=bounced (unknown user: "owner-mylist")

I looked everywere in my aliases and virtualuser files for the problem. I found nothing. Then I decided to manually issue the command which Postfix was running:

postfix/local[16648]: D4885AE4A0: to=<mylist-example-org@example.org>, relay=local, delay=2, status=sent ("|/usr/local/majordomo/wrapper resend -l mylist -C /usr/local/majordomo/majordomo.example.org.cf -h lists.example.org mylist-lists-exampleorg-outgoing")

So I did this from the command line:

cat ~/msg |/usr/local/majordomo/wrapper resend -l mylist -C /usr/local/majordomo/majordomo.example.org.cf -h lists.example.org mylist-lists-exampleorg-outgoing

Where ~/msg contained sample text which I wanted to send to the list. The error became obvious immediately. A quick modification of /usr/local/majordomo/majordomo.lists.example.org.cf. For those curious, I had to change this line from:

$listdir = "$homedir/lists/example.org";

to:

$listdir = "$homedir/lists/lists.example.org";

The lesson: when it's not doing what you want, do it yourself. And find the error.

MAJORDOMO WARNING (mj_majordomo) 4 November 2005

I started getting floods emails like this:

To: Majordomo-Owner@lists.example.org
From: majordomo@lists.example.org
Subject: MAJORDOMO WARNING (mj_majordomo)
Reply-To: majordomo@lists.example.org
Message-Id: <20051104183428.A206F5C8E@nezlok.example.org>
Date: Fri,  4 Nov 2005 10:34:28 -0800 (PST)
X-Virus-Scanned: by amavisd-new at example.org
X-Virus-Scanned: by amavisd-new at example.org
X-PM-PLACEHOLDER:                                          .

--

MAJORDOMO WARNING (mj_majordomo)!!

open of temp file '/usr/local/majordomo/lists/lists.example.org/shlock.93069' failed: Permission denied

In all, I got about 1160 of these messages within an 8 hour period. That's about 5 every two minutes. It was not pleasant. I also noticed that the Majordomo perl script was running:

majordom 91814 0.0 0.7 4012 3428 ?? Ss 10:24AM 0:00.74 /usr/bin/perl /usr/local/majordomo/majordomo -C /usr/local/majordomo/majordomo.lists.freebsddiary.org.cf (perl5.8.7) majordom 91811 0.0 0.7 4012 3428 ?? Ss 10:24AM 0:00.70 /usr/bin/perl /usr/local/majordomo/majordomo -C /usr/local/majordomo/majordomo.lists.phorum.org.cf (perl5.8.7)

I wrote a script to remove the queued up entries. This assumes you are using postfix:

mailq | grep Majordomo-Owner@lists.example.org |cut -c 1-9 | xargs -n 1 -J {} postsuper -d {}

It took me quite a while to find the cause of the problem. I did the usual things of checking for permission on the majordomo-related alias and mapping files. They need to be chown majordom (no, that's not a typo, the Majordomo user in FreeBSD is majordom; just eight characters).

The solution was chmod u+x for the directories in which my majordomo files resided. For example:

[root@nezlok:/usr/local/majordomo/lists] # ls -ld lists.*
drwxr--r--   4 majordom  majordom   512 Oct 28 03:00 lists.bsdcan.org
drwxr--r--   4 majordom  majordom   512 Nov  4 11:24 lists.freebsddiary.org
drwxr--r--  11 majordom  majordom  1024 Oct 10 17:27 lists.freshports.org
drwxr--r--   6 majordom  majordom   512 Sep  5 17:14 lists.freshsource.org
drwxr--r--   3 majordom  majordom   512 Nov  4 11:25 lists.phorum.org
drwxr--r--   5 majordom  majordom   512 Jul 11  2003 lists.racingsystem.com
[root@nezlok:/usr/local/majordomo/lists] #

For what it's worth, each of those directories contain the files for that virtual Majordomo domain:

[root@nezlok:/usr/local/majordomo/lists/lists.freebsddiary.org] # ls -l
-rw-r--r--  1 majordom  majordom   2664 Oct 24 07:28 freebsddiary-announce
drw-r--r--  2 majordom  majordom   2560 Jun  4  2004 freebsddiary-announce.archive
-rw-r--r--  1 majordom  majordom  16389 Aug 24 06:30 freebsddiary-announce.config
-rw-r--r--  1 majordom  majordom    121 Dec 27  1999 freebsddiary-announce.info
[root@nezlok:/usr/local/majordomo/lists/lists.freebsddiary.org] #

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