user_prefs not working

[John Tice <li...@johntice.com>]

Running SA on a Cpanel VPS that had an outage yesterday, when it came  
back up SA is not using any of the user_prefs files in the individual  
accounts. Support doesn't know what to do. The user_prefs are still  
in the proper places but just not being read, or not influencing the  
scores, no whitelists, etc. Can anyone offer troubleshooting advice  
that I can use directly or pass along to the support folks? Thanks.

Re: user_prefs not working

[Matt Kettler <mk...@verizon.net>]

John Tice wrote:
> Running SA on a Cpanel VPS that had an outage yesterday, when it came
> back up SA is not using any of the user_prefs files in the individual
> accounts. Support doesn't know what to do. The user_prefs are still in
> the proper places but just not being read, or not influencing the
> scores, no whitelists, etc. Can anyone offer troubleshooting advice
> that I can use directly or pass along to the support folks? Thanks.
In general it sounds like SA is no longer being called as the desired
user, and is instead always executing as something like root or mail.
That's the typical cause of this kind of stuff.

How's SA being called?
are they using spamc/spamd and passing spamc a -u parameter?
Or are they relying on some other part of the system su'ing to the
desired user before calling spamc?

I suppose it's possible file permissions got screwed up in the outage,
so they could also try running spamassassin --lint (which should be
SILENT) and then spamassassin -D --lint  while su'ed to a user to make
sure it's reading all the files correctly.

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