[rt-users] rt-mailgate and smrsh

[Pei Ku]

Just thought I passed this along after a few hours of pulling my hair out.

I was trying to test out rt-mailgate functionality.  After I did some Googling, I thought I set up everything correctly:

- as root, run 'ln -s /<path_to_rt_base>/bin/rt-mailgate /etc/smrsh/rt_mailgate' to make smrsh happy.

- add following to /etc/aliases for each RT queue:

rt-appserv:         "|/etc/smrsh/rt-mailgate --queue AppServ --action correspond --url http://localhost:8000/"
rt-appserv-comment: "|/etc/smrsh/rt-mailgate --queue AppServ --action comment --url http://localhost:8000/"


But I was still getting the annoying sendmail/smrsh error below:

   ----- The following addresses had permanent fatal errors -----
"|/etc/smrsh/rt-mailgate --queue AppServ --action correspond --url http://localhost:8000/"
    (reason: Service unavailable)
    (expanded from: <rt-appserv at admin-test.test.autc.com>)

   ----- Transcript of session follows -----
smrsh: "rt-mailgate" not available for sendmail programs (stat failed)
554 5.0.0 Service unavailable


Finally, it turned out that unix user 'mail' (uid 8) did not have chdir permission all the way to
the dir where rt_mailgate resides.  I installed RT (and apache, and perl) under a non-root unix
user account.  By default, /home/<rt_user>/ permission is 700.  When sendmail executes rt-mailgate,
it's actually executing it under uid 8 (shows in /var/log/maillog).  Since 'mail' user can't 
get into /home/<rt_user>/, it can't get to /home/<rt_user>/rt/bin/rt-mailgate.

There were some notes on the Net that indicated rt-mailgate (or a wrapper shell script that calls it)
needs to be owned by root:rt with permission 2755.  I didn't find them necessary (once I fixed my chdir problem).


Pei Ku
ATC

RT Install - Version Summary:

RT App Server:
  RH 8 - 2.4.20-20.8
  httpd-2.0.52
  mod_fastcgi-2.4.2
  perl-5.8.5
  rt-3.2.2

DB server:
  Oracle 9.2.0.4