mailer startup problem

[Eric Fielding]

In a recent article eric at geology.tn.cornell.edu (I) wrote:
>More on the problem I am having with getting "sendmail" to start up. I just
>found the "syslog" file, and it has these error messages:
>Sep  6 17:49:48 LOCALHOST: 3142 sendmail: NOQUEUE: SYSERR: getrequests: cannot b
>ind: Permission denied
>...
>Perhaps some file got set to the wrong owner? I changed the
>ownership of "/etc/*" to "root".

Answering my own question: It turns out that "sendmail" does not look at the
files in /etc, but instead looks at the file entries in /usr/lib that are links
to the files in /etc. All of the files in /usr/lib were owned by a regular
account, instead of "root". Changing them to "root" made sendmail start up fine.

I must say that this Ultrix system seems a lot more difficult to set up than
the VMS systems I am used to. And the Ultrix documentation is very good compared
to most U*ix manuals from what I hear... At least I did figure it out after a
while.

				++Eric Fielding