RE: running spamass-milter as non-root and rejecting spam

[Cassandra L Brockett]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: address@hidden 
> [mailto:address@hidden
] On Behalf Of Saurabh Barve
> Sent: Wednesday, May 18, 2005 4:26 PM
> To: address@hidden
> Subject: Re: running spamass-milter as non-root and rejecting spam
> 
> Cassandra L Brockett wrote:
> >  
> > 
> > 
> >>-----Original Message-----
> >>From: address@hidden 
> >>[mailto:address@hidden
> > 
> > ] On Behalf Of Saurabh Barve
> > 
> >>Sent: Wednesday, May 18, 2005 12:53 PM
> >>To: address@hidden
> >>Subject: running spamass-milter as non-root and rejecting spam
> >>
> >>Hi,
<snip>
>
> Well, when I run SpamAssassin as root and specify the 
> helper-home-dir as 
> /home/spamd, it gives me this in the logs:
> 
> spamd[2651]: info: setuid to root succeeded
> spamd[2651]: Still running as root: user not specified with -u, not 
> found, or set to root.  Fall back to nobody.
> 
> That's the reason I started running it with unprivileged user 
> spamd. I 
> googled this and found this in a lot of posts on the SA list.
> 
> And when I run it as spamd, I get this:
> spamd[]:Cannot write to /root/.spamassassin/user_prefs: 
> Permission denied
> spamd[2868]: Couldn't create readable default_prefs for 
> [/root/.spamassassin/user_prefs]
> 
> Even spamassassin --lint shows me that the directory for the default 
> prefs is /root/.spamassassin, even when I specified it to be 
> /home/spamd. Might this be because I ran sa-learn once as root. This 
> created the files auto_whitelist, bayes_seen, etc. inside 
> /root/.spamassassin. Is there a way to undo it?

Ah, the initial error message is saying that spamassassin is going to
use system-wide values for all users.  This is actually normal, and
nothing to be worried about.

If you want that message to go away you need to use per-user
configurations.

Ah... Spamassassin might be using /root/.spamassassin as default, but
the /home/spamd as specified with -H is where it sticks all the other
data... If you want your bayes data in /home/spamd you need to specify
that seperately (I use SQL for bayes, but the location for the bayes
data is set in the local.cf file).  I used to use local files on the
machine, but now that spamassassin can use remote sql servers, I do as
it makes backups of the system easier.

--
Cassandra