Upgraded my home server/desktop machine yesterday and all seemed ok.
When I checked this morning I discovered that output from overnight cron
jobs had gone to the journal log rather than being emailed to me. Also
logwatch had failed to run.
I quickly checked logwatch first by manually running the logwatch
service and it complained that /usr/sbin/sendmail did not exist. In
fact, sendmail was not even installed. The system uses postfix.
Honestly, I don't recall if it was installed previously or not. I got
new hardware last summer and did a fresh install of Fedora 39 then and
upgraded to 40, 41 and now 42.
In the following -> indicates a symlink.
Checking my Fedora 41 backups, I see the following chain
/usr/sbin/sendmail -> /etc/alternatives/mta ->
/usr/sbin/sendmail.postfix (which is an executable file)
I do not know what package owns /usr/sbin/sendmail.postfix unless
someone can tell me how to tell rpm to use a different rpm database than
the default one.
Under Fedora 42/ there was no /usr/sbin/sendmail. However, there was a
/usr/sbin/sendmail.postfix that was a symlink to
/usr/bin/sendmail.postfix.
I then installed sendmail. I tested logwatch again and it failed with
the same error about a missing /usr/sbin/sendmail. I uninstalledd
sendmail. This time logwatch worked because /usr/sbin/sendmail existed.
The removal of sendmail left behind the following chain of symlinks:
/usr/sbin/sendmail -> /etc/alternatives/mta ->
/usr/sbin/sendmail.postfix -> /usr/bin/sendmail.postfix
Apparently, removing sendmail left behind /usr/sbin/sendmail pointing to
(eventually) /usr/bin/sendmail.postfix. /usr/bin/sendmail.postfix is
owned by the postfix package. /usr/sbin/sendmail.postfix is not owned
by any package. Probably created by the install/remove script for sendmail.
After all this in order to get cron to email output I just had to
restart the crond service so it could see that /usr/sbin/sendmail now
existed.
Charlie
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