Re: help? "error: spamd: unable to determine home directory for user"

[OpenMacNews]

hi sidney,

I looked at the source code in spamd. I had not read the man page
documentation on -H carefully enough. It is used to set the $HOME
variable used by external helper apps like razor and pyzor, but is not
used for anything else. If you specify a --username, then that user must
have a home directory, independent of the -H option.

that seems to be true even if i do NOT specify --username, as 'root', and hence /var/root/... is presumed (read on)

I think the reason
for requiring it is that there may be places, specifically plugins, in
SpamAssassin that assume that there is a home directory, such as the
autowhitelist mutex code that you encountered.

than you for checking this and clarifying. it helped =)

Looking for what uses the home directory, I found several plugins,
specifically autowhitelist, bayes, and hashcash, make use of files that
by default are in ~/.spamassassin/. They each have a configuration
option that you can set to make the directory explicit, but they default
to being under the user's home.

plugins have configuration options?  new news to me!

RTFM-ing.

ah. looks like options can be spec'd in calling code, but not in userland activation, e.g. in init.pre, yes?

In any case, spamd is written to check that a home directory does exist
if --username is set to something. So you really do need to create a
directory for the maildaemon user and then everything should work ok. As
far as I can tell doing that will make the -H option unnecessary.

_what_ to do make sense.  thanks! =)





   /var/Settings/SpamAssassin/.spamassassin

per launch with:

   spamd \
   ...
   --siteconfigpath=/var/Settings/SpamAssassin/.spamassassin
   ...



BUT 'auto-whitelist' & 'auto-whitelist.mutex' appear in:

   /var/root/.spamassassin




thx! for your help, tho =)


cheers,

richard

imho, it would make things a bit more straightforward to understand -- if not altogether easier -- if I could tell spamd to use a given .spamassassin dir. at the moment, running spamd as root-->suid(exim user), my sitewide 'bayes.mutex', 'bayes_seen', & 'bayes_toks' end up where i told/expected them to -- in: all my .razor files also appear, as instructed, in /var/Settings/SpamAssassin/.razor just doesn't make a lot of sense to me as to the why, and was not terribly clear from the docs.

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