Cron output mail lost with update to RELENG_7

[Jeremy Chadwick]

On Fri, Mar 05, 2010 at 11:32:47AM -0800, Kevin Oberman wrote:
> I have discovered a problem with the mail sent by cron jobs (I refer
> only to logs, not invocations of mail from scripts.) They never are
> delivered.
> Mar  5 10:32:30 noc5 postfix/sendmail[1175]: fatal: root(0): No recipient addresses found in message header
> Mar  5 10:32:30 noc5 postfix/sendmail[1175]: fatal: root(0): No recipient addresses found in message header
> Mar  5 10:37:00 noc5 postfix/sendmail[1268]: fatal: root(0): No recipient addresses found in message header
> Mar  5 10:37:00 noc5 postfix/sendmail[1268]: fatal: root(0): No recipient addresses found in message header
> 
> This showed up when I upgraded the system to RELENG_7 yesterday. My
> previous install was RELENG_7 of May 2, 2009 and it delivered the logs
> without any problems. No other changes were made. postfix was 2.6.5.
> 
> I have this same issue on all 8.0 systems I have, but I was blaming a
> fault in postfix config. Now I realize that this is not the problem.
> 
> I really don't know quite where to look for this. Any clues would be
> appreciated. 

I don't have this issue on any of our RELENG_7 or RELENG_8 systems, all
of which use postfix and WITHOUT_SENDMAIL in /etc/src.conf.

It sounds like cron is trying to spawn something like mail(1) (more
likely /usr/sbin/sendmail; would have to look at the code) and passing
it either incorrect flags or actual content within the header itself,
e.g. a missing To: line.

Since postfix is involved, have you verified your /etc/mail
configuration to make sure mailwrapper is referring to the correct
postfix binaries?

The only other thing I can think of would be, possibly, some sort of
cronjob root has (either crontab -l or /etc/crontab) which makes use of
the MAILTO environment variable.  See cron(8) for what I'm talking
about.

You might have to run cron in debug mode (see -x flag; your argument
list will probably be quite long :-) ) to see what it's doing.
Otherwise truss or ktrace might be the only way to track down what's
going on underneath.

-- 
| Jeremy Chadwick                                   jdc at parodius.com |
| Parodius Networking                       http://www.parodius.com/ |
| UNIX Systems Administrator                  Mountain View, CA, USA |
| Making life hard for others since 1977.              PGP: 4BD6C0CB |