Regarding "GSSAPI Error" message

[Minoru Asano]

Hello,
At the customer site, the following message
has appeared at messages file:

sendmail: GSSAPI Error : Miscellaneous failure No such file or directory

[ENVIRONMENT]
RHEL ES 4 UP2

[QUESTION]
- What does the message mean ?
- What shall we do if the message appear ?
- What does the message impact to the system ?

Thank you for advice.
Best Regards.
/Minoru.Asano

[Matti_Kurkela · Accepted solution]

Usually GSSAPI refers to Kerberos authentication, but it can be related to other things too (see http://www.faqs.org/faqs/kerberos-faq/general/section-84.html ).

RHEL ES 4 is ready for Kerberos authentication by default - it just needs to be configured. In this case, it would seem that Kerberos authentication is not completely configured.

Is Kerberos in use at the customer site, and is it supposed to be used with sendmail? In other words, is this server supposed to require Kerberos authentication before accepting email from a mail client using SMTP?

If not, there should be no serious impact as the system will fall back to other authentication mechanisms. You might want to disable the Kerberos authentication attempts to avoid this log message.