[Mailman-Users] Bad error message

[Mark Sapiro]

Dwight Tovey wrote:
>
>It was driving me nuts because the 'nofiles' group does exist in
>/etc/group and was being used by some of the qmail processes.  After much
>digging around, I finally found that the message was coming from the
>'mailman' program itself.  In src/common.c, line 142, there is a fatal()
>call in 'check_caller()' if the caller's GID fails to resolve to a name
>(getgrgid() returns a NULL).  The error message though is misleading.  I
>thought that it had a group name (nofiles) and couldn't resolve it to a
>GID.  Since there was a 'nofiles' group, I didn't know what was going on. 
>As it turned out, the qmail delivery program was running under a GID that
>didn't have a group entry and was thus triggering the error.
>
>I think a better error message would be something like:
>"Failure to find group name for GID %d:...".  Once I changed the message
>to that, it was easy to see what was going on.

Sorry you had such a runaround on this. If you had searched the
archives of this list, you might have found
http://mail.python.org/pipermail/mailman-users/2005-October/046934.html
which might have helped.

Anyway, thanks for the report. I have developed a patch for the message
which will make it to SourceForge and into CVS as soon as I have a
chance to compile and test it.

-- 
Mark Sapiro <msapiro at value.net>       The highway is for gamblers,
San Francisco Bay Area, California    better use your sense - B. Dylan