sendmail panic and "su" error

[sachin soni]

i'm heaving a k-class server with 10.20,
after booting continously "sendmail panic;unable to deliver mesg.%$**, is coming on
all the machines and terminals .
same time i have SU error tooo,if i login as a
normal user and give
#su for superuser it gives me
su :invalid ID.
and if i gives lpstat -t command as a normal
user it gives error :
"unable to open status file."
all these problem started together .
pls give me solution for this

regards

[Paula J Frazer-Campbell]

Hi
This could be a potential security issue.

As a start power down disconnect the network and modems from this machine, reboot and pay close attention to all of the error messages as it boots up.

At the console login as root and stop the sendmail daemon.
/sbin/init.d/sendmail stop

If you cannot login as root search this forum for "root disabled" as there are many treads on the subject.

Files to look at for login problems are:-

/.profile profile
/etc/logingroup System's default group access list file
/etc/passwd System's password file
/etc/profile System's profile
/var/adm/sulog Log of all attempts
/etc/btmp
/etc/utmp
/etc/wtmp

Then start looking at all of your log files to try and identify what has happened.

I would first sort out the login problem, and then investigate as to why it happened.

HTH

Paula

[Rita C Workman]

I'd check my /etc/passwd file. Make sure you don't have any bogus characters or blanks at the top. It's possible the file may be corrupt. Try restoring it from a backup.

Just a thought,

[Victor BERRIDGE]

You may have /var full, since you have had a sendmail panic, its not impossible mail ahs filled up /var also so I would try to rm the content of /var/spool/mqueue trim /var/mail/*
on top on the previous recommendations
Good luck

Victor