Sendmail aliases db wierd error..

[Jeremy Loukinas]

Jul 21 15:35:59 ewbs1 sendmail[10538]: h6LJZxo10536: SYSERR(root): Cannot open hash database /etc/mail/aliases.db: Invalid argument


Any advice?

[Jeremy Loukinas]

system2:/etc/mail # /sbin/init.d/sendmail start
hash map "Alias0": unsafe map file /etc/mail/aliases
/etc/mail/aliases: 6 aliases, longest 9 bytes, 76 bytes total
sendmail
system2:/etc/mail #

Also getting this when I restart sendmail.

[John Dvorchak]

I believe you have a permissions problem in /etc/mail. For the directory /etc/mail should be:

drwxr-xr-x 2 root bin 8192 Jul 15 09:27 /etc/mail

Then for the contents of /etc/mail

chpama01:[ /etc/mail ]
root> ll
total 160
-rw-r--r-- 1 bin bin 880 Nov 14 2000 aliases
-rw-r--r-- 1 root mail 24576 Jul 16 2002 aliases.db
-rw-r--r-- 1 root sys 0 Jul 15 09:27 aliases.dir
-rw-r--r-- 1 root sys 1024 Jul 15 09:27 aliases.pag


I think you have an older version of sendmail and you may want to upgrade it. The above perms are for sendmail v 8.12.x

[someone_4]

Hi can you go to /etc/mail
and in that dir you should have a file called aliases. Look at it. Default should look like so below.


# Alias for mailer daemon
MAILER-DAEMON : root

# RFC 822 requires that every host have a mail address "postmaster"
postmaster : root

# Aliases to handle mail to msgs and news
nobody : /dev/null

# System Admistration aliases
operator : root
uucp : root
daemon : root

# Local aliases


# end of file



Now if your file does not look like that make sure it is the right format. Depending on what you are trying to do you usualy dont need an alias unless you want email for a specific user to go to another mailbox. If that is the case post your file and we can help you fix it.

If your file does not look like the default you can do the following..

Make backups of the existing files just incase:

mv aliases aliases.ol
mv aliases.db aliases.db.old

Copy the default aliases file to the /etc/mail dir.

cp /usr/newconfig/etc/mail/aliases /etc/mail/

rebuild the aliases file using the newaliases command:

newaliases

that will rebuild your aliases.db from the new aliases file.

you can also restart sendmail.


Let us know..

Richard