Introduction and a question!

tightweb · Newbie Joined: Jun 29, 2009 Posts: 4

HI ALL!!

I've been programming in PHP over the past years and have left other administrative functions to others. Although I know enough to do a little networking work, I've really have not been working on our linux system for quite a while.

We're always busy upgrading to a newer version of Fedora. Currently we're running anywhere from Fedora 5 to 9 and testing 10.

Recently one of our people reset a server because of an outage. We run a lot of symbolic links and NFS links (usually ensuring our sendmail files and access files are uniform). Evidently this person did something that affected our web mail (SquirrelMail).

Since web mail generally affects only my clients, Ive been tasked with fixing the problem - and quite frankly I just don't understand it well enough.

Here's the problem: I've got send squireel mail up and running - it logs the user in and you can send mail and see the sent mail. However, it won't pick up the files from the INBOX. I've read just about everything I could on the inernet and I've reset the config file using conf.pl but nothing seems to work. The only thing I can think of is when the NFS files where reset, the engineer blew away the entire /etc/mail file. Was there something there that needs to be replaced --- or is there somthing else I don't know about?

The SquirrelMail version we're working with is 1.4.4-2.

Thanks for any help - maybe I can return the favor since I have many years with php, mysql and html!!

ffreeloader · Master Joined: Aug 10, 2005 Posts: 561

Unfortunately I have never used Squirrel mail and I don't know anyone else here who might be experienced with it other than the site admin, and he doesn't show up here too often. What I would do is go to http://squirrelmail.org, join their mailing list, and ask for help there. How to join the mailing list is found on the Support page.

tightweb · Newbie Joined: Jun 29, 2009 Posts: 4

Thanks ffreeloader. Just like me, squirrelmail comes with most fedora packages and we just took it for granted.

Several years ago I was a bit more into it - but I haven't touched it since then and now I'm just stumped. I visted the squirrelmail site and read over their information (it's like the old video tape instructions, lousy). I've went into our other servers and attempted to set the conf.pl the same, but nothing works.

Thanks again. I'll visit the link you suggested, but if anyone else has any suggestions in the meantime, I'd appreciate it.

heaths · Newbie Joined: Jul 10, 2009 Posts: 1

thanks Ed for the uplifting comment. It is good to know that somehow I could be of help although the thread is way old.
[url]simultion credit

tripwire45 · Posted: Fri Jul 17, 2009 2:22 pm Post subject:

Did I miss something. This thread is only a few weeks old. Question

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tightweb · Newbie Joined: Jun 29, 2009 Posts: 4

Yeah, I'm a little confused myself!

jimmo · Posted: Tue Jul 21, 2009 2:48 pm Post subject:

That's another one of those hidden links I mentioned in another post. Note that the user only has 1 post.

jimmo · Posted: Tue Jul 21, 2009 3:01 pm Post subject:

I realize that this is probably a bit late and as someone pointed out, I do not show my face as much as I should. Smile

I've never administered a Squirrel setup, but it seems that it it could a simple permissions problem. If NFS. Samba, etc are involved, plus symlinks, you dealing with multiple levels of permissions that can cause things to get really confusing really fast.

Check the Squirrel config for where it expects the files to be and then trace back the directories to see what the permissions are. Since you can login and send email, it would seem your authentitication is fine. Can you access the email using a command like-tool like mailx?

tightweb · Newbie Joined: Jun 29, 2009 Posts: 4

As a matter of fact we do use nfs to make the mail files available on two servers. However, the permissions allow updates to the file from both servers and email --- including email using webmin, seems to work fine

I have attempted to work backwards from the configuration file but that has not worked either. The problem that I'm having is I can't tell from the config file what director indicates where the incoming email files are located (unlike sent or deletes which work).

The squirrel mail application worked well until some of the files were deleted in /etc/mail. After wards, we resinstalled squirrel mail and everything worked except for being able to read email still on the server - we can send mail but we can read mail received.

I've got to admit, we're stumpted????

jimmo · Posted: Tue Jul 21, 2009 4:55 pm Post subject:

I use Horde for my private email and it reads directly out of the users normal mailbox. Depending on the configuration this could be the user's home directory or somewhere under /var/spool. If you are using imap, it could be /var/spool/imap/user/USERNAME.

You could try sending a user some email (i.e. from the command-line) and then use find to search for all files modified in the last X minutes.

find / -type f -mmin -30 | more

You might a long list of stuff, but it should still be few enough to handle. Hopefully something will jump out at you, like

/some/wierd/directory/MAIL/USERNAME

From their you can backtrack looking for permissions issues.

What are you using to accept incoming email? Sendmail? Postfix? Do you have some special email server (i am using Cyrus).

Squirrel is simply a client and you tell it where to look or how to look. For example, it could be set up for IMAP so the client accessing the files differently than if POP3.

Try a running check the log files, for example

tail -f /var/log/mail

or whereever you are logging mail to. Then send a message and see what ends up in the log file.

jenny · Newbie Joined: Oct 26, 2009 Posts: 2

Hey All.
This is Jenny, Since I have installed Linux on my laptop my work has been very slowed down, because the shortcuts available with XP or vista i can not find it at here. System works very efficiently and fast with Linux and security is also very high. I have seen Windows 7 installed in my friend's PC, its working very nice. Windows7's features are like Vista but it does not load so much like Linux. So I think of installing Windows 7 on it. Stay connected.
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