>I use PHP to send mail. Recently, emails originating
>from the server stopped sending. After some
>investigation, I looked at the /var/log/maillog file,
>and saw the following errors when a mailing tried to
>originate:
>
>Aug 29 13:16:10 x sendmail[1162]: g7TIGA001162:
>SYSERR(apache): Can't create transcript file
>./xfg7TIGA001162: Permission denied
>Aug 29 13:16:10 x sendmail[1162]: g7TIGA001162:
>SYSERR(apache): Cannot create ./dfg7TIGA001162:
>Permission denied
>
>I looked in my mail queue directory, and there were
>like 15,000 files...looked at a sample few of them,
>and they were jibberish.

jibberish to you, perhaps, but I think some of those files are internal
sendmail files.

Don't mess with them if you can avoid it.

Expect a ton of email to get sent when you fix this, though... :-)

>Question 1: I'm assuming the error has something to do
>with the chown/chgrp/chmod of the /var/spool/mqueue
>directory? I don't know how this could have changed,
>nothing was modified on the server. Currently: owner =
>root, group = mail, permissions = rwx rx rx

Look into sendmail.cf and find the line that has:
Troot
or something like that on it.

That should be telling sendmail that 'root' is a "trusted" user and allowed
to do the gnarly things that need to get done for email to get sent.

There are probably other Trusted users like 'nobody' and, err, I dunno. 
Whatever.

I'm not sure of the syntax for additional trusted users, but let's hope you
have at least two (2) trusted users, because then adding another one is easy
:-)

>Question 2: Did I get hacked??

Maybe.  Maybe not.

Did you re-install sendmail?
Did anybody dink around with sendmail.cf?
Did you try to improve/increase security?
Did you change the "User" setting in httpd.conf?

There are a zillion things you could have done thinking it was a Good Idea
that would have broken sendmail...

If you changed the User in httpd.conf from 'nobody' to 'apache', for
example, and 'nobody' is a 'Trusted' sendmail user, and 'apache' ain't, then
'nobody' can send email that 'apache' can't...

The Bad News:
I dunno how you're really supposed to fix the T in sendmail.cf... There's a
sendmail.mc or somesuch which is an 'm4' file which you're supposed to edit
and then re-generate the sendmail.cf from that...

I'm not bright enough to do that, and just hacked sendmail.cf directly when
I needed something.

It's wrong, but it works, and I don't have the time to figure out this m4
stuff.  Maybe next go-around.

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