[Tfug] Exim problems

[John Gruenenfelder]

I'm running Exim 4.67-1 on my home system and it sends/receives mail on the
Net.  It's actually running quite well and locked down sufficiently that I'm
not having any problems with outsiders.

The problems occurs with some of the cron jobs that are installed by default
with the Debian Exim packages.  Each day I get two emails from the cron deamon
with these subjects:

  Subject: Cron <mail at foxstar> if [ -x /usr/sbin/exim_tidydb ]; then
  /usr/sbin/exim_tidydb /var/spool/exim retry >/dev/null; fi

  Subject: Cron <mail at foxstar> if [ -x /usr/sbin/exim_tidydb ]; then
  /usr/sbin/exim_tidydb /var/spool/exim wait-remote_smtp >/dev/null; fi

Both messages have the same one line body:

  /bin/sh: /dev/null: Permission denied

In addition I get this email about once a week (despite being in the
cron.daily directory):

  Subject: Cron <root at foxstar> test -x /usr/sbin/anacron || run-parts --report
  /etc/cron.daily

With a gigantic body (currently at 465K).  Here's a piece:

/etc/cron.daily/logrotate:
error: error renaming
/var/log/exim/mainlog.0.1.gz.1.gz.1.gz.1.gz.1.gz.1.gz.1.gz.1.gz.1.gz.1.gz.1.gz.1.gz.1.gz.1.gz.1.gz.1.gz.1.gz.1.gz.1.gz.1.gz.1.gz.1.gz.1.gz.1.gz.1.gz.1.gz.1.gz.1.gz.1.gz.1.gz.1.gz.1.gz.1.gz.1.gz.1.gz.1.gz.1.gz.1.gz.1.gz.1.gz.1.gz.1.gz.1.gz.1.gz.1.gz.1.gz.1.gz.1.gz.1.gz.4.gz to
/var/log/exim/mainlog.0.1.gz.1.gz.1.gz.1.gz.1.gz.1.gz.1.gz.1.gz.1.gz.1.gz.1.gz.1.gz.1.gz.1.gz.1.gz.1.gz.1.gz.1.gz.1.gz.1.gz.1.gz.1.gz.1.gz.1.gz.1.gz.1.gz.1.gz.1.gz.1.gz.1.gz.1.gz.1.gz.1.gz.1.gz.1.gz.1.gz.1.gz.1.gz.1.gz.1.gz.1.gz.1.gz.1.gz.1.gz.1.gz.1.gz.1.gz.1.gz.1.gz.5.gz: File name too long
error: error renaming

That just repeats again and again with some slight variations.

And yet everything is working more or less correctly.  The log files are
properly rotated.  The Exim spool directories are nice and tidy.  I've looked
at the scripts in question but I couldn't figure out what was wrong.  I also
tried saving my config and then purging/reinstalling Exim, but that didn't
help.  I've got other machines running Exim, though not at exactly the same
version, and they're running fine.  It's also not specific to this exact
version as the problem has been around for a while.

Any ideas what is going wrong?


-- 
--John Gruenenfelder    Research Assistant, UMass Amherst student
                        Systems Manager, MKS Imaging Technology, LLC.
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