[BlueOnyx:00283] Re: Webmail issues

[Steve Demore]

Michael,

I'm having the same problem that Christian was originally having and spent quite a bit of time looking at the opendir related files last night (the httpd error files all point to opendir violations).  The only thing in the /etc/httpd/conf.d/squirrelmail.conf file currently is an alias command:

***************************************************

#
# SquirrelMail is a webmail package written in PHP.
#

Alias /webmail /usr/share/squirrelmail

***************************************************

(this is the entire file)

If there is something that is supposed to be in there, I suspect it has been corrupted on the yum server.  I yum uninstalled and reinstalled last night and had the same result.  Permissions all seem to be ok though.

Steve


-----Original Message-----
From: Michael Stauber [mailto:mstauber at blueonyx.it] 
Sent: Wednesday, January 14, 2009 5:01 AM
To: BlueOnyx General Mailing List
Subject: [BlueOnyx:00180] Re: Webmail issues

Hi Steve,

> > Going into Security->PHP Settings and emptying 'Open Basedir' appears
> > to fix it.

That should not be necessary. Squirrelmail automatically extends the existing 
Open Basedir directives as needed. That's handled (for the public Apache) 
through /etc/httpd/conf.d/squirrelmail.conf

> > httpd did crash at this point, and I had to kill -9 it.. 
> > When httpd restarted it worked.
> >
> > Not sure why httpd is crashing :S

Hmmm. Not sure.

> [root at tess squirrelmail]# ls -l
> total 36
> -rw-r----- 1 root apache  499 Nov 18  2007 config_local.php
> -rw-r----- 1 root apache 6502 Nov 18  2007 config.php
> -rw-r----- 1 root apache   65 Nov 18  2007 default_pref
> -rw-r----- 1 root apache 1054 Nov 18  2007 sqspell_config.php
>
>
> Eek, thats not going to help things either..

No, your /etc/squirrelmail/ and the stuff within is perfectly fine.

>   opening /var/lib/squirrelmail/prefs/default_pref
> Could not create initial preference file!
> /var/lib/squirrelmail/prefs/ should be writable by user apache
> Please contact your system administrator and report this error.

Aha, THERE we got the problem! :o)

[root at main /]# ls -la /var/lib/squirrelmail/
total 12
drwxr-xr-x  3 root   root   4096 Jan 12 12:41 .
drwxr-xr-x 21 root   root   4096 Jan  1 15:30 ..
drwx------  2 apache apache 4096 Jan 14 06:49 prefs

Check that your /var/lib/squirrelmail/prefs directory is owned by 
user "apache" and group "apache". If it is not, do a ...

chown apache:apache /var/lib/squirrelmail/prefs

... and try again. That should fix it. 

Am a bit puzzled why the ownerships of that directory could be wrong. On the 
six BlueOnyx boxes I have up at the moment it it's set correctly on each and 
every one.

-- 
With best regards

Michael Stauber