0

I've run into a problem, which I don't entirely understand. Occasionally I get this line in /var/mail.err, although all messages seem to be saved normally (at least I think so):

dovecot: lda(<address>): Error: safe_mkstemp(/tmp/dovecot.lda.) failed: Permission denied

I understand that this permission can be adjusted manually, but I worry that something might have gone wrong with the system itself.

The only result that I could google is this: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?format=multiple&id=632951, which says that it is a bug...

Some additional info:

# uname -a
Linux 3.13.0-30-generic #55-Ubuntu SMP Fri Jul 4 21:40:53 UTC 2014 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
# dovecot --version
2.2.9

I don't know if that matters, but I am also running the system on RAID1, and it was a very fresh install of the new version of ubuntu.

I would appreciate any comments or suggestions how to solve this.

1 Answer 1

0

Can you paste the permissions: ls -ld /tmp. Also if there is enough space: df -h /tmp. Then also check if you find any entries in /var/log/kern.log around similar time.

Edit: the issue turned out that the permissions of /tmp were somehow messed up. Correcting with sudo chmod 1777 /tmp seems to have fixed the issue.

3
  • This is the output # ls -ld /tmp drwxr-xr-t 3 root root 4096 Jul 15 21:17 /tmp # df -h /tmp Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/md1 3.7G 7.5M 3.4G 1% /tmp and there is nothing interesting in kern.log around these times, only ufw block events
    – Bozon
    Jul 15, 2014 at 20:10
  • So the problem is that /tmp permissions have somehow been messed up. It should show "drwxrwxrwt'. You can correct with "sudo chmod 1777 /tmp". This is likely to cause other major problems and not just in dovecot. Also check /var/tmp which should also show 'drwxrwxrwt'. As you mention, this could point to some other activity which went wrong and messed up /tmp and possibly other things. You might want to look closely at /var/log/auth.log, /var/log/syslog for suspicious activity when dovecot first started showing these errors.
    – sumwale
    Jul 15, 2014 at 20:53
  • Thanks for this. I've changed permissions, but I absolutely do not see any other suspicious entries in other logs... anyway this is now working, I suppose, also /var/tmp had the correct permissions set... Can you update your answer so that it says that permissions should be 1777 please?
    – Bozon
    Jul 15, 2014 at 21:28

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .