UNIX for Advanced & Expert Users

Dec 20 15:34:32 hostname sendmail[2525]: [ID 702911 mail.warning] File descriptors missing on startup: stderr; Bad file number
Dec 20 15:34:32 hostname sendmail[2524]: [ID 702911 mail.warning] File descriptors missing on startup: stderr; Bad file number
Dec 20 15:34:32 hostname sendmail[2529]: [ID 702911 mail.warning] File descriptors missing on startup: stderr; Bad file number
Dec 20 15:34:32 hostname sendmail[2532]: [ID 702911 mail.warning] File descriptors missing on startup: stderr; Bad file number
Dec 20 15:34:32 hostname sendmail[2528]: [ID 702911 mail.warning] File descriptors missing on startup: stderr; Bad file number
Dec 20 15:34:32 hostname sendmail[2526]: [ID 702911 mail.warning] File descriptors missing on startup: stderr; Bad file number

Hello Everyone, I would really appreciate your assistance on this matter.

We disabled sendmail on our server (V480 w/ Solaris 9), but we still get this error messages. It seems like there is an appliction sending mail to our server or an application sending messages from our server. This message occur during startup. Please explain.

I also found this comment on the web when I googled the error messages:

since version 8.12.1 (8.12.0 ?) sendmail complains if a program piping
data to it doesn't have stdin, stdout and stderr opened; smtpfwdd(8)
doesn't open stdout and stderr when forwarding a mail to sendmail,
therefore an anoying system messages is generated for each incoming mail

Can anyone help me find a way to make this log go away?

probably from the same website you were loooking at ...

Code:

>Fix:
just open /dev/null as stdout and stderr...

since you're saying these errors only occur at startup, i suggest you try to grep out "mail" from the S* scripts in /etc/rc1.d, /etc/rc2.d and /etc/rc3.d and fix it there ... if you don't find the culprit there, check the scripts in /etc/init.d ... if you still don't find it --- check what has been installed recently and go from there ... good luck!