Status Report - Thanks everyone

[Ben Luey <dogbert@sirius.com>]

After hearing all the woes of my messing with the linux box that I setup
at work, here's a good-news status report:

The mail works.
I didn't mess anything else up (IP masquerading, samba, DNS)



How I killed the mail, and then resurrected it:


I tried to get sendmail to masquerade all internet mail as
hearing@slip.net. I looked at the bottom of the sendmail.cf file and
realized I way, way, out of my league. I must have accidentally presses
a key in the depths of sendmail.cf, scrolled up and saved file. I then
registered a domainname for the Hearing Society, and tried to get
sendmail to masquerade as that. In the process I made sure that all my
backups of sendmail.cf had this messed of rules at the bottom of the
file. At the same time, I accidentally, in the /home directory, typed:
"rm bulletins/ -r -f *" which deleted the bulletins directory and then
everything. oops. I lost my procmailrc file in that and as I was trying
to recreate it, I couldn't get any mail to forward, then realized that
mail was dead, with sendmail saying that  Host name failure: root: no in
DNS.

I tried a lot of things, thinking it was related to either the masq
setup or deleting the home directory, or DNS. I undid as much as I could
and mail was still dead. nslookup gave be errors that I now realize are
unimportant, but I spent a lot of time trying to 'fix' DNS. I finally
uninstalled fetchmail, nmh, mutt, and exim, in order to uninstall
sendmail with rpms. I installed everything but mutt back,  I copied back
my /etc/mail/ dir, and kept the new, pure sendmail.cf. and mail worked.

I did, however, change the permissions of the directories under /
thinking that when I deleted /home I might have lost permissions. This
caused mail accessed through pine and not pop to be read-only for
everyone but root. Nick, miraculously detected this quickly and had me
do "chmod 1777 /tmp" which fixed everything.

Then only thing that doesn't work right now is the procmail filter. If I
put not conditional statements in, it will forward, when when I add any
* ^To or * ^Subject:. lines it doesn't forward. I don't know why. I
might reinstall it seeing as that worked for sendmail. (any ideas,
please e-mail me). I also might just be mistyping the code.


My lessons:

never to 'rm -r -f'  I'm renaming my rm file to becarefulewhendeteing
and making a new rm file that will just move to files to /deleted, and
have a weekly cron job delete /deleted. I don't trust myself, and if you
were me, you wouldn't trust youself either.

Never change permissions on files, unless you are sure they are wrong!

Always backup  /etc and /home
Always backup /etc/sendmail.cf

don't mess with /etc/sendmail.cf




Thanks to everyone for their help,

Special thanks to Nick for all his long-distance help. I don't know what
I would have done without his help,

Ben





--
Ben Luey
dogbert@sirius.com

http://www.sirius.com/~dogbert/

The software I bought said it required Windows '95 or better, so I installed it on Linux!