new machine : mail problem : solved
 

Yet another obscure + unexpected bump to trip over.

I carefully copied .fetchmailrc from the other machine
-- I'm now using the new one to send this -- made sure
it was owned by 'purslow' (user) & had read permissions. Not enough !

Could I get error msgs ? How could I find out what it was doing ?
Google showed msgs from others with this type of problem
& what they were doing was running 'fetchmail -v'.
I hadn't thought that I could run it myself (slightly red face).

RTFM : front + centre it says to try 'fetchmail -vvv --nodetach --nosyslog'.
That immediately told me the very non-obvious but crucial information :
" ~/.fetchmail must have no more permissions than 700". Whyever ?

So 'chmod', wait till the next 5-min point at which the script runs
& yes, there are my test msgs from the older machine waiting for me !

This is yet another example of what was described in a recent thread :
Gentoo may need a lot of time to install & some time to maintain
-- like training, then exercising a dog, perhaps -- ,
but the problems are rarely > 1 layer deep & there's lots of help.

HTH others.

--
========================,,======================== ====================
SUPPORT ___________//___, Philip Webb
ELECTRIC /] [] [] [] [] []| Cities Centre, University of Toronto
TRANSIT `-O----------O---' purslowatchassdotutorontodotca

new machine : mail problem : solved
 

On Wed, 19 Sep 2012 01:18:45 -0400
Philip Webb <purslow@ca.inter.net> wrote:

> RTFM : front + centre it says to try 'fetchmail -vvv --nodetach
> --nosyslog'. That immediately told me the very non-obvious but
> crucial information : " ~/.fetchmail must have no more permissions
> than 700". Whyever ?

That's quite normal actually. The file might contain passwords and you
don't want every joker on the system reading them.

It *really* should have printed that warning to the console though.

--
Alan McKinnon
alan.mckinnon@gmail.com

new machine : mail problem : solved
 

120919 Alan McKinnon wrote:
> On Wed, 19 Sep 2012 01:18:45 -0400
> Philip Webb <purslow@ca.inter.net> wrote:
>> RTFM : front + centre it says to try 'fetchmail -vvv --nodetach
>> --nosyslog'. That immediately told me the very non-obvious but
>> crucial information : " ~/.fetchmail must have no more permissions
>> than 700". Whyever ?
> That's quite normal actually. The file might contain passwords
> and you don't want every joker on the system reading them.

Yes, that is obvious once it's pointed out (grin).

> It *really* should have printed that warning to the console though.

Well yes, but it's normally running via a user cron job
& error msgs probably get dumped somewhere or even nowhere.
The place they should show up is syslog or mail.warn ,
but they certainly weren't arriving there.

The new machine seems to be working properly now,
but I've had 5 odd problems along the way, some perhaps bugs :
(1) System Rescue has to look for its data file on all the devices,
but it hangs up at unformatted drives or swap partitions (bug ?);
(2) when you change from an Intel to an AMD CPU,
you have to change the <x>HCI settings in the kernel
in order to be able to use a USB mouse/keyboard ;
(3) Fluxbox rewrites its 'apps' file at every exit,
so to force Gkrellm to appear in a particular workspace
you have to point to another file in 'init':
Fluxbox is an excellent simple desktop manager,
but its session management needs redesign & expansion ;
(4) the latest Stage3 installs Python 3 as default (in some way),
so scripts which worked earlier may need rewriting
or you need to make them explicitly use Python 2 ;
(5) Fetchmail has an odd, if understandable, requirement for its config file,
but doesn't provide adequate warnings when it fails thereby (bug ?).

I hope my descriptions of problems + solutions help others
& thanks again to those who have contributed to the latter.

--
========================,,======================== ====================
SUPPORT ___________//___, Philip Webb
ELECTRIC /] [] [] [] [] []| Cities Centre, University of Toronto
TRANSIT `-O----------O---' purslowatchassdotutorontodotca