Nagios 2.03 not playing nice with mail program

Nagios
1

Hi,

I’m running Nagios on RH Enterprise with a cPanel front end. cPanel comes with Exim which I use as the defualt mail program for the domains I host on this box.

Nagios is configured properly in terms of alerts and web interface. The only problem is when sending out alerts. I only need to send out an alert to qn e-mail address. Following is the error message I get when manually forcing an alert as a test and using the command Nagios would use.

/usr/bin/printf “%b” “Service: HTTP\nHost: myhost\nAddress: mydomain.com\nState: CRITICAL\n
Info: $OUTPUT$\nDate: $DATETIME$” | /bin/mail -s “PROBLEM: myalias/HT
TP is CRITICAL”
-bash: /bin/mail: Permission denied

So, I guess that the issue is permissions with the printf script in the /bin/mail directory. I tried changing permissions but received “Operation not Permitted”

Anyone with experience with Nagios and Exim please help.

Any and all help will be appreciated

Best

-Alex

2

You stated the error was " -bash: /bin/mail: Permission denied ", so it’s the permissions on /bin/mail

ls -la /bin/mail
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root mail 70740 Feb 21 14:42 /bin/mail

3

This is my output of ls -la /bin/mail

-rwxrwx— 1 bin mail 69276 Aug 1 2003 /bin/mail*

4

Alex:

The command you stated will be run by nagios. Thus you need to change permission so nagios can access the /bin/mail in you permisions it stated that “Others” has no permission to access the file. Try changing the permission of /bin/mail to chmod 755 /bin/mail. Then try again.

goodluck.

5

Absolutely graemann, it’s there in black and white. Only bin and mail users can execute /bin/mail. The permission should be 755 as you stated, otherwise why have the mail command if nobody can execute it?

6

Thanks graemann! That was it. Now my phone is throwing all kinfs of SMS messages from my test hosts.

Best

-Alex