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Date:      Thu, 2 Dec 1999 09:52:56 -0600
From:      "Aaron Sonntag" <aaron@sonntag.org>
To:        "Blake Swensen" <blake@pyramus.com>, <questions@FreeBSD.ORG>
Subject:   RE: Weird POPPER Problems
Message-ID:  <NDBBIMDNELEBLKLCAJPKKELBCMAA.aaron@sonntag.org>
In-Reply-To: <3.0.16.20011202065747.357f5e7a@pyramus.com>

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I hope the following helps and isn't going the wrong direction... or at
least I might give you some ideas.
I had the same problem with individual users and diagnosed my problem as a
corrupted file.  I removed the file /var/mail/.[user].pop and everything
worked fine.  Since then I have found out that popper just does that
sometime with the temp files... 'drops the file' and that if you change the
uid of a user it can do the same thing.  In both cases the fix was delete
the temporary pop file.
In mail list archives I also found similar problems with similar fixes:

[start]
	In /var/mail type rm .*
	That will remove all the temporary files, and popper should work from
	there.
[end]

[start]

	| I've recently moved my mail server from a Solaris x86 platform over to
	| FreeBSD. I *love* the performance improvement, but I've run into an
	| irritating qpopper problem. As a friend put it: "Oh, you've got the new
	| qpopperdropper!" :)
	| I've ran qpopper 2.53 on both systems. Qpopper creates a temporary drop
	| file named /var/mail/.username.pop. On Solaris, this file was deleted
	| after use. They hang around in FreeBSD. If a new customer happens to pick
	| the same username as a old, deleted account, they'll get this error when
	| they try to pop their mail:
	| -ERR System error, can't open temporary file, do you own it?

	Keyword is "new customer" - this implies "new/different userid" which
	means qpopper cannot (after having done a setuid() to the target user)
	open the temporary drop box since it's owned by another userid (one that
	isn't even present in /etc/passwd [anymore]).
[end]

I also saw references to using chown to fix ownership and chmod for
permissions but that was the obvious thing I checked and it seems you have
looked at that possibility as well.

Aaron Sonntag


-----Original Message-----
From: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG
[mailto:owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG]On Behalf Of Blake Swensen
Sent: Thursday, December 02, 1999 8:59 AM
To: questions@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject: Weird POPPER Problems

Ok..  I may have send this out before, but since my mail is acting weird I
thought that I would try again.


Running POPPER  in 3.2-RELEASE, the client gets the message that popper
cannot open the temporary file..."do you own it?"  I am assuming that
POPPER is having a problem with /var/mail/.[user].pop and some privilege is
not being set right.

The mail server is a NIS secondary server and client and is automounting
(amd) the /var/mail from an NFS server (as do all my hosts).

Has anyone seen this problem before ... I am assuming that it is a problem
with NIS and the way that I have /var/mail shared across the network. Is
there a better way?

For the time being, I have reset my domains so that the pop mail host is
the NFS server (for whom /var/mail is local) and that is woking for a
temporary fix. This server works pretty hard and the service needs to be
moved eventually.

Peace,
Blake


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