This caught me off guard setting up a cron job - about went nuts as it was not obvious, nor have I ever seen this on prior identical installs. I am mentioning it here as I know the fine folks that support Virtualmin and the community might have insight on this. Also, it is likely while I worked around it, there could be issues when creating virtual servers and email accounts/users. Hopefully I can get guidance into how this should be “fixed” - read on…
Vague specs:
PROXMOX
CentOS 6.7
Virtualmin Pro 4.18 (serving)
Virtualmin 4.1.8 gpl (used only for DNS for the most part.)
I wrote a cronjob to run well no secret, rkhunter (regardless of its worth) and kept getting errors in the mail portion. Most of this stuff I already have saved to deploy, so I am going to say I am very sure this is unique to this set of installs.
After banging my head a while, I finally noticed what was causing the problem. The issue was at the symbolic link @ usr/bin/mail. On both installs that link is “Mail” rather than “mail” as I am sure I have always seen on prior installs. The easy work around was to make the cron job(s) refer to ~ “Mail” with a capital “M” but since I have yet to start making up the virtual servers, I am unsure of what to do here. My guess is that the link should be “mail” and I would like to know if other systems in Virtualmin are going to try and access this link with the lower-case “m” as is what I always recall having.
I am not trying to place blame here and will be forthcoming in that I have spent several months making 100% sure Virtualmin’s install.sh is right as I have to have the new php installed (I also download the new install.sh at the time of deployment so if any changes are implemented I will have them.) I have really vetted this - installing all of the php and removing it from the install.sh. I know - I will likely be told this is unsupported or ill advised, but I cannot use the older versions for a few things are dependent on at least a newer version than that gets installed on CentOS 6 right out of the box.
So the question for the community now is, do I leave the link as “Mail” - is that supported or correct? (Doubting it…) or should I change it to the lower case “mail” ? I am unsure how to proceed as I have zero idea how many things may want to ping /usr/bin/mail within Virtualmin when I start creating domains and email accounts and the like. In fairness to me with regard to “hacking” the up to date php into these installs, A) php has nothing to do with that link - (Virtualmin’s install makes it) and B) I have been using this procedure from day one and cut and paste commands to make super sure not only all of my deployments are the same, but also that I do not cause issues for the Virtualmin install.
Oh and no errors in any of the server logs, but keep in mind, this is for all intents and purposes, just a very carefully made install. - Things like having the root domain at /var/www/html have not even yet been modified.
This “Mail” capitalized symbolic link is the first of its kind in many deployments using the same commands in the same order. Advice highly appreciated and I thank you in advance.
Regards,
Douglas W