Hello Jerry,
In a nut-shell;
It generally takes root equivalent to initiate system services. Hence
the su.
The startup of the individual service usually handles changing the
effective user to some definition defined in the individual setup files
of the service providing it was written to allow changes.
Look for the start script in the /etc/init.d/ folder it is called
spamassassin. (full path= /etc/init.d/spamassassin) But make no changes
here!
You will see there that the spamassassin daemon is called spamd and is
daemonized and run under the user spamd. (the user should of been
created upon installation)
In the case of Spamassassin, the general configuration files are
typically in the /etc/spamassassin folder depending on distro. You
should limit your changes to this folder.
As has been stated, all .cf files here are examined.
Specifically, the /etc/spamassassin/local.cf file which will contain
setup information on bayes as well as other things.
The bayes section should indicate (and allow) setting of the path to the
db among other things.
Hope this helps with your main question.
Also if you are running Amavis, then Amavis calls spamassassin I think
via spamc (the client to spamd the daemon) and does so using the user
amavis.
Amavis runs tend to run seperately from the normal spamassassin run
structure and can be difficult at best to follow/troubleshoot.
Clear as mud ?
Regards
Bob
On 11/23/19 11:09 AM, Jerry Malcolm wrote:
Meanwhile, back at the ranch.... I still have the one outstanding
question from before the 'interruption'....
I know it may be the unpardonable sin according to some to ask a
question without having a PhD in Linux. But after 30+ years in
Windows and (yes) OS/2 design and development for IBM, I have not had
much Linux experience. Forgive me. My assignments at IBM were not in
the AIX/*un*x arenas. I've learned a lot about Linux in the 4 months
since moving to my new AWS environment. But I'm still learning. I
understand about running as 'ec2-user' (the automatic default id that
AWS gives you in each ec2 instance). I also understand 'sudo su'
which causes CLI commands to run as root. But it gets murky when
running services. I have to use 'sudo' to start the spamassassin
service. But does the service itself really run as root?
My one single question is... where does SA expect to find bayes_toks
when running the spamd service 'site-wide-only; no per-user stuff'
-- When running from the command line as a normal user, the SA log
says it is looking for bayes_* in /user/ec-2user/.spamassassin. Ok,
that makes sense.
-- When running from the command after "sudo su" (Horrors!!! how I can
ever be forgiven????) the SA log says it is looking for bayes_* in
/root/.spamassassin. Ok, I can understand that as well.
-- But when I start up spamd as a service, the log says it now wants
to find bayes_* in /tmp/spamd-4551-init/.spamassassin. (and the
4-digit number changes each time I restart the service.
I have no problem putting bayes_toks wherever SA wants it to be for
running as a service. But I don't think a random named folder in /tmp
is the right place.
What is causing SA to change from a fixed folder to a random /tmp
folder for bayes_* when running spamd as a service? What do I need to
do to make it look in a fixed folder? And what folder would that be
for 'site-wide-only' use? (ok... that's 3 questions.... :-) ).
Thanks so much.
Jerry
