Problems with mail

**ddausch** · 02-26-2004 06:53 AM

Two days ago on our server the files /etc/passwd, shadow and group were replaced with completely wrong files from another server due to a stupid admin.

We have moved a backup in and the correct passwd, group and shadow files are in place now. But we still have some problems:

Nobody on the server can send mail. Sendmail on the commandline always gives the following error:

2004-02-26 13:39:50 Exim configuration error in line 505:
group mail was not found

A user trying to send with smtp always gets:

550 Verification failed for <user@domain.com>

And our mailman is also not working and always gives a Internal Server Error when accessing the web interface. Apache Error Log says:

Permission denied: exec of /usr/local/cpanel/3rdparty/mailman/cgi-bin/admin failed

Does anybody know what could be the problem? The only thing we did wrong on the server is that for some hours the passwd, group and shadow files where wrong...

We already opened a ticket at cpanel, but since yesterday they didn't reply anymore and our clients are killing us because they can't send mail for 2 days now...

Greetings,
Dominik

**bamasbest** · 02-26-2004 07:08 AM

could your /etc/valiases files have been replaced as well?

**ddausch** · 02-26-2004 07:14 AM

No. It was absolutely nothing but these three files. Something must be screwed up now and i don't know what.

I've just seen that i missed something at the mailman error. The complete error is:

[Thu Feb 26 14:03:48 2004] [error] [client 213.183.83.9] (13)Permission denied: getgrgid: invalid groupid 32019
[Thu Feb 26 14:03:48 2004] [error] (13)Permission denied: exec of /usr/local/cpanel/3rdparty/mailman/cgi-bin/admin failed
[Thu Feb 26 14:03:48 2004] [error] [client 213.183.83.9] Premature end of script headers: /usr/local/cpanel/3rdparty/mailman/cgi-bin/admin
[Thu Feb 26 14:03:48 2004] [error] [client 213.183.83.9] File does not exist: /home/mediacom/public_html/500.shtml

And it seems that also some client cgis get the same error message and are no more running...

**bamasbest** · 02-26-2004 07:43 AM

Well, this has not happened to me on a cPanel box (yet

But, something similar to this happened on a couple of old cobalt raq boxes. No matter how I tried to tweak the passwd/shadow/groups files, things remained screwed up.

The only way that I found to fix things was to backup all of the webfiles of each account. Delete each account and then re-create each account (including re-creating all account users and account user passwords!!!(:

There might be a simple fix, but that worked for me.