/etc/aliases strangeness after upgrade from 13.5 to 14.4

D

dr_grid

Greetings,

I am running into some behavior that I don't understand. I have recently upgraded from 13.5-RELEASE to 14.4-RELEASE on both
of my FreeBSD platforms and have seen the following. When sending an email locally I get an error message about /etc/aliases:

Code: 
 aliases line 81: syntax error
sendmail: could not parse aliases file `/etc/aliases': No error: 0

The line 82 of /etc/aliases contains:
Code: 
 msgs: "| /usr/bin/msgs -s"

Okay, fine. Edit the file to comment out that line, run newaliases and no errors.

Edit the file again to uncomment the line, run newaliases and it complains:

Code: 
root@monkey:/ # newaliases
aliases line 81: syntax error
newaliases: could not parse aliases file `/etc/aliases': No error: 0

Clearly it does not like the entry for msgs, but I am at a loss to explain this. It worked fine on 13.5, but not on 14.4

And perhaps related to this, email messages prior to the upgrade showed a header like:
Code: 
Charlie Root

And after the upgrade it shows:
Code: 
<root@monkey.obscuredname.net>

Charlie & is the name field in /etc/passwd, and obscured.net is a bogus name for posting.

I do have two jails on one of the hosts that still run 13.5 userland, and they do not have these issues, so it clearly seems to be a userland change from 13.5 to 14.4.

Any suggestions or pointer will be appreciated. And as always, something new to learn. Thanks.
 
cat /etc/aliases | grep -v \#
Code: 
MAILER-DAEMON: postmaster
postmaster: root
_dhcp:    root
_pflogd: root
auditdistd:    root
bin:    root
bind:    root
daemon:    root
games:    root
hast:    root
kmem:    root
mailnull: postmaster
man:    root
news:    root
nobody:    root
operator: root
pop:    root
proxy:    root
smmsp:    postmaster
sshd:    root
system:    root
toor:    root
tty:    root
usenet: news
uucp:    root
abuse:    root
security:    root
ftp:         root
ftp-bugs:     ftp
 
Charlie_ said:
Could this be because the default MTA was changed from Sendmail to DMA (DragonFly Mail Agent) in 14.x.
Click to expand...
Thanks for the information. I will investigate this. For what it is worth, one of the jails that I have yet to update is for email on my local network, but I am sure that doesn't make a difference. I will report what I find out.
 
Charlie_ said:
Could this be because the default MTA was changed from Sendmail to DMA (DragonFly Mail Agent) in 14.x.
Click to expand...
A quick inspection of mail message headers shows that the old 13.5 installation used 'submit' to accept mail for delivery,
and that the new 14.4 install shows 'DragonFly Mail Agent v0.13+' as accepting the email for delivery.

Guess it is time to go down the email rabbit hole. There is a man page for dma, but I don't see anything for 'submit'....

Thanks again for the clue!
 
VladiBG said:
It's because of the space bar. Search the forum for dma aliases file error for more info.

P.s.
Show your line 81, not 82
Click to expand...
I am not sure what you mean by "It's because of the space bar" -- perhaps the space between the pipe and the command?
I will give the forum a search as you suggest, thank you.

Here are the lines leading up to and including line 82. They are comments, and I did note that the line number of the error reported was one less than what appears to be the offending line. Running more -N /etc/aliases and clipping most of the lines ahead....

Code: 
78 
79 # NOTE: /var/msgs and /var/msgs/bounds must be owned by sendmail's
80 #       DefaultUser (defaults to mailnull) for the msgs alias to work.
81 #
82 msgs: "| /usr/bin/msgs -s"
83

Again, thanks.
 
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