Hi Haines,

Haines Brown writes:

> I installed Beowulf over Ascii several months ago and want to report
> general success.
>
> However, there was a glitch I do not understand. I could not get SMTP
> authentication (I'm running exim4 and mutt). Turned out that exim
> could not read my etc/eximr4/passwd.client file. Its ownership and
> permissinons were
>
> -rw-r----- 1 root saned 653 Oct 29 12:17 passwd.client

I would have expected this file to have group Debian-exim (or mail), not
saned which is normally used for a scanner server.

Please check the access and ownership of /etc/eximr4 and files in it.

  ls -ld /etc/eximr4        # for the directory itself
  ls -l /etc/eximr4         # for the files in it

Then use the chgrp and chmod utilities to fix things up.

> which is the same as they were on Ascii. User was in the saned group.
>
> I recovered an ability to send e-mal by changing the permission to
>
> -rw-r--r--

This is probably a very Bad Thing. Everyone can now read your password
file :-o

> If user is in saned group, shouldn't the user running exim be able to
> get SMTP authentication by reading passwd.client?

Only if that user can also read the content of the directory in the
first place. For that it needs r-x on the directory.

# I vaguely remember that only --x is sufficient but am no longer sure
# (and too lazy to check ;-)

Hope this helps,
--
Olaf Meeuwissen, LPIC-2            FSF Associate Member since 2004-01-27
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