latest Secure Shell from HP site

[Greg Hobbs]

This is informational more than anything. After installing the latest Secure Shell from HP (on an HP-UX 11.0 system), user's connecting with it were unable to get their mail - we were getting a message about not being able to create a lock file. It turns out that connecting through Secure Shell changes the $MAIL environment variable to /var/spool/mail/$USER while our mail files are written to /var/mail/$USER. I worked around this by modifying a script we call from /etc/profile to export the MAIL env variable using the old path.

We didn't have this with our previous version - 3.10.002 - so I'm guessing it's changed since then, but I couldn't find anything in the release notes on the docs.hp.com site.

Anyway, just a heads up in case any one else encounters this.

[Steven E. Protter]

Thats a permissions and .profile settings issue.

I am pretty sure it has nothing to do with Secure Shell.

Check the env command on the users and make appropriate changes to variable or permissions on the files the variables point to.

SEP

[G. Vrijhoeven]

Hi,

I think SEP is right but to answe your question:

A.03.61.002

downloadable at:
http://software.hp.com/portal/swdepot/displayProductInfo.do?productNumber=T1471AA

Gideon

[Greg Hobbs]

Steven,

That's what I thought too, initially. So I created the /var/spool/mail directory - we'd never had one before this - and set permissions and ownership. I could then run mail but since the the actual mail files are written to /var/mail/username, I still didn't see the messages until I manually re-exported the $MAIL as /var/mail/$USER. The other thing I noticed was this: i have a system that has Secure Shell on it but we haven't turned off telnet yet. When I telnet to the system with my account, the $MAIL variable is /var/mail/myusername. If I ssh to it, the variable is /var/spool/mail/myusername.
I basically did what you suggested, anyway, and set up the MAIL env variable throught /etc/profile since it was happening to every account we ssh'd with.


Gideon, thanks for the link. I double checked to be sure, that's the version I downloaded and installed that started all of this.

Greg