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Bug 124831 - group mailman does not exist - using root
Summary: group mailman does not exist - using root
Keywords:
Status: CLOSED DUPLICATE of bug 125421
Alias: None
Product: Fedora
Classification: Fedora
Component: mailman
Version: 2
Hardware: All
OS: Linux
medium
medium
Target Milestone: ---
Assignee: John Dennis
QA Contact:
URL:
Whiteboard:
Depends On:
Blocks:
TreeView+ depends on / blocked
 
Reported: 2004-05-31 00:31 UTC by Jens Petersen
Modified: 2007-11-30 22:10 UTC (History)
1 user (show)

Fixed In Version:
Doc Type: Bug Fix
Doc Text:
Clone Of:
Environment:
Last Closed: 2006-02-21 19:03:53 UTC
Type: ---
Embargoed:

Attachments (Terms of Use)

Description Jens Petersen 2004-05-31 00:31:31 UTC 
Description of problem:
When I installed mailman from FC2 I get a lot of warnings
about group mailman not existing, which doesn't seem nice.

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):
mailman-2.1.4-4
mailman-2.1.5-3

How reproducible:
every time

Steps to Reproduce:
1. # rpm -iv mailman-2.1.4-4
  
Actual results:
Preparing packages for installation...
mailman-2.1.5-3
Warning: group mailman does not exist - using root
Warning: group mailman does not exist - using root
Warning: group mailman does not exist - using root
Warning: group mailman does not exist - using root
Warning: group mailman does not exist - using root
Warning: group mailman does not exist - using root
:
:
:       <one for every file in the pkg manifest I guess>
:
:
:
Warning: group mailman does not exist - using root
Warning: group mailman does not exist - using root
crontab:  user `mailman' unknown


Expected results:
No warnings or errors.

Additional info:
As noted the same also happens with the latest mailman package in
FC devel.

Marking this severity security just in case this might have any
security inplications.
Comment 1 Jens Petersen 2004-05-31 05:01:36 UTC 
I wonder if this is somehow related to selinux, since several
people on #fedora-devel told me that they can't reproduce this...
Comment 2 John Dennis 2004-06-01 14:46:35 UTC 
Was that a typo? Did you mean they can reproduce it?

I've heard reports of this before and I believe with other packages
besides mailman that depend on specific system user accounts. Since
the rpm in each instance does in fact create the user my assumption is
also this is an selinux issue. I'm adding Dan Walsh to the cc list,
hopefully Dan can shed some light on whether selinux will prevent rpm
from creating system user accounts.
Comment 3 Jens Petersen 2004-06-06 15:31:31 UTC 
In the meantime I managed to accidently delete the installation
where I was experiencing this problem. )-:

As I recall it was failing on the groupadd command in %pre.
Btw I installed the policy pkg on the machine to get rid of the
missing selinux files warnings when installing rpm packages...
Comment 4 Jens Petersen 2004-06-06 15:36:49 UTC 
To comment 2 - no, no typo: they could reproduce they said.  Presumably
they're not running selinux though.

Forgot to mention in comment 3, that installing the policy pkg
put my machine in permissive mode afaict after the next reboot.
(If this is the case, it doesn't seem very nice behaviour to me.)
Comment 5 Jens Petersen 2004-06-06 15:47:10 UTC 
Ugh: that should read "they could *not* reproduce".  Sorry for the
confusion.
Comment 6 Bob Cochran 2004-06-10 04:35:33 UTC 
I can confirm the problem. This happened to me on a freshly installed
system with SELinux disabled.
Comment 7 John Dennis 2004-06-10 15:05:56 UTC 
For those of you seeing this problem are you using nis to manage your
groups?

What does the group line in /etc/nsswitch.conf say?

What do these commands return?

% grep '^mailman:' /etc/group
% getent group mailman
% getent group 41
Comment 8 Jens Petersen 2004-06-22 01:49:13 UTC 
I don't use nis fwiw.
Comment 9 John Dennis 2004-08-30 20:11:20 UTC 

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 125421 ***
Comment 10 Red Hat Bugzilla 2006-02-21 19:03:53 UTC 
Changed to 'CLOSED' state since 'RESOLVED' has been deprecated.
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