mailx/sendmail has stopped logging

[Dek_1]

I have recently truncated the mail log in /var/adm/syslog/mail.log and now it is not being updated.
I have tried a stop and a start of sendmail
Also the configuration of sendmail has not changed ( loglevel=9 )
Has anyone any ideas about what I have missed ?

Its on HPUX

[morganelan]

Stopping and Starting the sendmail Daemon

If the sendmail configuration file or frozen configuration changes, you should kill and restart the sendmail daemon so that it re-reads the configuration file.

The command

# /usr/lib/sendmail -bk

run by the superuser, kills a sendmail daemon started with -bd, whether or not it was started with the -q interval flag. It does not kill a sendmail daemon started only with -q interval. You must kill this type of daemon by finding its process ID and killing it explicitly.

NOTE: Do not kill sendmail with kill -9. This may cause sendmail to corrupt the alias database. Use kill-15 instead.

[Dek_1]

morganelan,
I stopped and started sendmail :-

/sbin/init.d/sendmail stop
/sbin/init.d/sendmail start
ps -ef | grep sendmail

and it certainly has restarted : new pid and starttime.
But it is still not appearing to log

[Muthukumar_5 · Accepted solution]

check these:

1) /etc/syslog.conf
mail.debug /var/adm/syslog/mail.log

2) # ls -l /var/adm/syslog/mail.log
-r--r--r-- 1 root root

3) # ls -ld /var/adm/syslog
dr-xr-xr-x 2 bin bin

4) /sbin/init.d/sendmail stop
> /var/adm/syslog/mail.log
/sbin/init.d/sendmail start

5) tail -f /var/adm/syslog/mail.log

hth.

[Dek_1]

I tried that out :-
dekerp.root > : ls -al /var/adm/syslog/mail.log
-rw-r----- 1 root sys 0 Aug 5 10:12 /var/adm/syslog/mail.log
dekerp.root > : chmod 444 /var/adm/syslog/mail.log
dekerp.root > : ls -al /var/adm/syslog/mail.log
-r--r--r-- 1 root sys 0 Aug 5 10:12 /var/adm/syslog/mail.log
dekerp.root > : ls -ld /var/adm/syslog
dr-xr-xr-x 2 bin bin 8192 Aug 5 10:13 /var/adm/syslog
dekerp.root > : /sbin/init.d/sendmail stop
Sendmail pid is 13792
Killing sendmail...
Sendmail killed.
dekerp.root > : > /var/adm/syslog/mail.log
dekerp.root > : ls -al /var/adm/syslog/mail.log
-r--r--r-- 1 root sys 0 Sep 8 13:11 /var/adm/syslog/mail.log
dekerp.root > : /sbin/init.d/sendmail start
/etc/mail/aliases: 8 aliases, longest 32 bytes, 128 bytes total
sendmail
dekerp.root > : tail -f /var/adm/syslog/mail.log


But even when I sent a mail
mailx ......
While the recipent got the mail, the log registered nothing.

But thanks for your help so far. As you can see some of the permissions were wrong

[Geoff Wild]

How did you truncate the log in the first place?

> /var/adm/syslog/mail.log

or did you delete, then touch it?


Try restarting syslogd:

kill -HUP `cat /var/run/syslog.pid`

Rgds...Geoff

[Raj D.]

Hi Peter ,

Hope you have not deleted the mail.log file.

Check the file and try restarting syslogd:

# ls -l /var/adm/syslog/mail.log (check the file)

# ps -ef | grep syslogd [ Note the PID]
# kill -HUP PID

Then verify the log file...

Cheers,
Raj.

[Dek_1]

Bingo
Thanks to Geoff for the final piece, and thanks to Muthukumar for the structual bits. It is all working now - so I can put that one down to experience.
Next time I truncate the log I will do it properly ;-)

[Dek_1]

Thanks all