The EX_OSERR
exit code (value 71) results from various operating system errors,
several of which are described in this section. In general, this exit
value is accompanied by an error message describing the problem.
When sendmail is unable to get a
pipe(2) connection to send the mail message to a
delivery agent, it logs one of the following errors and the
fork(2)'d child exits with
EX_OSERR:
recipient... openmailer(delivery agent): pipe (to mailer)
recipient... openmailer(delivery agent): pipe (from mailer)
If sendmail is unable to
dup(2) a file descriptor so that it can write to
its pipe, it logs one of the first three errors shown here. If
sendmail fails to write to its transcript file
(as set by the -X switch; Section 14.2), it logs the last error shown here. In all
four cases the current open file descriptors are logged, as described
in SIGUSR1:
recipient... openmailer(delivery agent): cannot dup pipe file descriptor for stdout
recipient... openmailer(delivery agent): cannot dup stdout for stderr
recipient... openmailer(delivery agent): cannot dup pipe file descriptor for stdin
recipient... openmailer(delivery agent): cannot dup xscript file descriptor for stdout
If a delivery agent cannot be executed, sendmail
logs the following error message, and the
fork(2)'d child exits with
EX_OSERR:
Cannot exec delivery agent: reason
To save (cache) information about hosts to which connections have
been made, sendmail saves a copy of the file
descriptors for that connection to its internal
mci structures (-d11.1).
If it cannot duplicate a file descriptor, it logs one of the
following messages and the
fork(2)'d child exits with
EX_OSERR:
deliver: cannot create mailer output channel, fd=file descriptor
deliver: cannot create mailer input channel, fd=file descriptor
When looking up the MX record for a host, the
resolv library can return an absurd value. When
that happens, the following message is logged and that MX record is
ignored:
getmxrr: res_search (host) failed with impossible h_errno (bad value)
To queue a message, sendmail must save a
qf file to its queue directory. If it cannot
create that file, if the directory exists, and if the
uid of sendmail is 0, one
of the following error messages will be logged (depending on your
version of sendmail) and the
fork(2)'d child will exit with
EX_OSERR:
Cannot create
Cannot create "qf file" in "directory" (euid=uid): reason
queueup: cannot create qf file, uid=uid: reason
cannot rename(tf file, qf file), uid=uid
When sendmail has successfully connected to a
remote host, it checks to see whether it knows to whom it connected.
If, for some strange reason, it doesn't know, it
logs this error and drops the connection, and the
fork(2)'d child exits with
EX_OSERR:
deliver: no hostname
