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Date:      Fri, 3 Dec 1999 08:03:23 -0800 (PST)
From:      Blake Swensen <blake@pyramus.com>
To:        "Aaron Sonntag" <aaron@sonntag.org>
Cc:        <questions@FreeBSD.ORG>
Subject:   RE: Weird POPPER Problems
Message-ID:  <3.0.16.19991203080218.2e9752be@phil.pyramus.com>

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Yeah... been there. Only now popper sends back the same error, and does not
create the temp file.  

The temp files are created as owned by user:bin with 600 permissions.  If I
create an empty file, change the ownership to user:usr (common user group),
the popper seems to work...... for at least one session. This baffles me as
only the user has RW access to the file ( not the group) but changing the
group permissions solves the problem!  Yikes.


Any brainstorm on this issue would be appreciated.

Peace,
Blake

At 09:52 AM 12/2/99 -0600, Aaron Sonntag wrote:
>I hope the following helps and isn't going the wrong direction... or at
>least I might give you some ideas.
>I had the same problem with individual users and diagnosed my problem as a
>corrupted file.  I removed the file /var/mail/.[user].pop and everything
>worked fine.  Since then I have found out that popper just does that
>sometime with the temp files... 'drops the file' and that if you change the
>uid of a user it can do the same thing.  In both cases the fix was delete
>the temporary pop file.
>In mail list archives I also found similar problems with similar fixes:
>
>[start]
>	In /var/mail type rm .*
>	That will remove all the temporary files, and popper should work from
>	there.
>[end]
>
>[start]
>
>	| I've recently moved my mail server from a Solaris x86 platform over to
>	| FreeBSD. I *love* the performance improvement, but I've run into an
>	| irritating qpopper problem. As a friend put it: "Oh, you've got the new
>	| qpopperdropper!" :)
>	| I've ran qpopper 2.53 on both systems. Qpopper creates a temporary drop
>	| file named /var/mail/.username.pop. On Solaris, this file was deleted
>	| after use. They hang around in FreeBSD. If a new customer happens to pick
>	| the same username as a old, deleted account, they'll get this error when
>	| they try to pop their mail:
>	| -ERR System error, can't open temporary file, do you own it?
>
>	Keyword is "new customer" - this implies "new/different userid" which
>	means qpopper cannot (after having done a setuid() to the target user)
>	open the temporary drop box since it's owned by another userid (one that
>	isn't even present in /etc/passwd [anymore]).
>[end]
>
>I also saw references to using chown to fix ownership and chmod for
>permissions but that was the obvious thing I checked and it seems you have
>looked at that possibility as well.
>
>Aaron Sonntag
>
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG
>[mailto:owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG]On Behalf Of Blake Swensen
>Sent: Thursday, December 02, 1999 8:59 AM
>To: questions@FreeBSD.ORG
>Subject: Weird POPPER Problems
>
>Ok..  I may have send this out before, but since my mail is acting weird I
>thought that I would try again.
>
>
>Running POPPER  in 3.2-RELEASE, the client gets the message that popper
>cannot open the temporary file..."do you own it?"  I am assuming that
>POPPER is having a problem with /var/mail/.[user].pop and some privilege is
>not being set right.
>
>The mail server is a NIS secondary server and client and is automounting
>(amd) the /var/mail from an NFS server (as do all my hosts).
>
>Has anyone seen this problem before ... I am assuming that it is a problem
>with NIS and the way that I have /var/mail shared across the network. Is
>there a better way?
>
>For the time being, I have reset my domains so that the pop mail host is
>the NFS server (for whom /var/mail is local) and that is woking for a
>temporary fix. This server works pretty hard and the service needs to be
>moved eventually.
>
>Peace,
>Blake
>
>
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