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Posted to dev@spamassassin.apache.org by bu...@bugzilla.spamassassin.org on 2005/12/15 23:15:46 UTC

[Bug 4739] New: spamd logs "mkdir /dev/null: File exists" errors if its user has no home dir

http://issues.apache.org/SpamAssassin/show_bug.cgi?id=4739

           Summary: spamd logs "mkdir /dev/null: File exists" errors if its
                    user has no home dir
           Product: Spamassassin
           Version: 3.1.0
          Platform: Macintosh
        OS/Version: Mac OS X
            Status: NEW
          Severity: normal
          Priority: P3
         Component: spamc/spamd
        AssignedTo: dev@spamassassin.apache.org
        ReportedBy: brian@enchanter.net


I invoke spamd as "/usr/local/bin/spamd -d -x -u nobody".  It appears to work properly, but for every 
message it checks, "spamd: mkdir /dev/null: File exists at ///Library/Perl/5.8.1/Mail/SpamAssassin.pm 
line 1467" appears among the other messages in /var/log/mail.log.

This may be happening because user "nobody" has no home directory (set to "/dev/null"). But there is 
no reason why spamd should be attempting to create any per-user configuration files in its user's home 
directory. I've commented out AWL from v310.pre, and I've set "bayes_auto_learn 0" in local.cf. Before I 
disabled AWL and Bayes, several other lines were also logged which indicated attempts to create things 
in /dev/null (see attachment).

With the same configuration, spamd 3.0.4 had no problems and did not log these errors.



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[Bug 4739] spamd logs "mkdir /dev/null: File exists" errors if its user has no home dir

Posted by bu...@bugzilla.spamassassin.org.
http://issues.apache.org/SpamAssassin/show_bug.cgi?id=4739





------- Additional Comments From brian@enchanter.net  2005-12-16 14:48 -------
Adding "--virtual-config-dir=/tmp" to spamd is a workaround and prevents the error from appearing. 
spamd creates nothing in /tmp, which is correct, but this means that there is no reason it should have 
been complaining about not being able to create something in its user's (nonexistent) home directory 
either.





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[Bug 4739] spamd logs "mkdir /dev/null: File exists" errors if its user has no home dir

Posted by bu...@bugzilla.spamassassin.org.
http://issues.apache.org/SpamAssassin/show_bug.cgi?id=4739





------- Additional Comments From brian@enchanter.net  2005-12-15 23:18 -------
Created an attachment (id=3307)
 --> (http://issues.apache.org/SpamAssassin/attachment.cgi?id=3307&action=view)
The error messages logged by spamd 3.1.0 for each message it processes.

This demonstrates spamd freaking out because it's running as 'nobody', whose
home directory is '/dev/null', and it's unable to create per-user config files
there.



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[Bug 4739] spamd logs "mkdir /dev/null: File exists" errors if its user has no home dir

Posted by bu...@bugzilla.spamassassin.org.
http://issues.apache.org/SpamAssassin/show_bug.cgi?id=4739


felicity@apache.org changed:

           What    |Removed                     |Added
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
             Status|NEW                         |RESOLVED
         Resolution|                            |INVALID




------- Additional Comments From felicity@apache.org  2006-08-02 01:54 -------
The problem is that you have a home directory set to a file.

As for creating files in the userdir, you would need to change things like
bayes_path as well.

closing as invalid.



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