# cannot restart sendmail [solved]

## Majed17

here is the output:

Code:

gentoo ~ # /etc/init.d/sendmail restart

 * Stopping sendmail ...

head: cannot open /var/run/sendmail.pid for reading: No such file or directory

kill: usage: kill [-s sigspec | -n signum | -sigspec] pid | jobspec ... or kill -l [sigspec]

kill: usage: kill [-s sigspec | -n signum | -sigspec] pid | jobspec ... or kill -l [sigspec]                                                      [ !! ]

 * ERROR: sendmail failed to stop

when i create the file /var/run/sendmail.pid

it doesn't help:

Code:

gentoo ~ # /etc/init.d/sendmail restart

 * Stopping sendmail ...

kill: usage: kill [-s sigspec | -n signum | -sigspec] pid | jobspec ... or kill -l [sigspec]

kill: usage: kill [-s sigspec | -n signum | -sigspec] pid | jobspec ... or kill -l [sigspec]                                                      [ !! ]

 * ERROR: sendmail failed to stop

in /var/log/messages :

Code:

Aug  4 15:31:30 localhost nagios[4392]: wproc:   stderr line 01: Program mode requires special privileges, e.g., root or TrustedUser.

Aug  4 15:31:30 localhost nagios[4392]: wproc:   stdout line 01: WARNING: RunAsUser for MSP ignored, check group ids (egid=1000, want=209)

Aug  4 15:31:30 localhost nagios[4392]: wproc:   stdout line 02: can not chdir(/var/spool/clientmqueue/): Permission denied

here are the permissions:

gentoo ~ # ls -l /var/spool

total 16

Code:

drwxrwx--- 2 smmsp smmsp 4096 Aug  4 15:30 clientmqueue

drwxr-x--- 4 root  cron  4096 Jul 31 16:50 cron

drwxrwsr-t 2 root  mail  4096 Aug  4 12:45 mail

drwxrwxrwx 2 root  mail  4096 Aug  4 15:02 mqueue

i tried unmerging sendmail and reinstalling it but that didn't help.

any idea what to look at?Last edited by Majed17 on Wed Aug 12, 2015 6:48 am; edited 1 time in total

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## Majed17

the solution was to back up to fresh version of gentoo and when installing sendmail change the hosts file to include the hostname of the machine so that sendmail would start quickly.

for the permission error the solution is to,

set the directory /var/spool/mqueue to root:root and then,

```
chmod g+w /var/spool/mqueue
```

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## Majed17

i managed to reproduce the problem, when i added some folders to /etc/mail/ then sendmail would not restart saying missing .pid file. i removed the folder and restarted the system and it worked again.

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