[SM-USERS] data prefs permission error after login

[Ryan D. <dt...@da...>]

Hello:

 

We've had a working squirrelmail for a long time now. Yesterday, we added to
new users to the mail server, configured the Maildir and sent initial email.
After this, users could no longer use the squirrelmail system. Behavior is
different for existing versus the two new users, but the error message is
the same:

 

ERROR

Preference file, ../data/[USERNAME].pref.tmp, could not be written. Contact
your system administrator to resolve this issue.

 

For existing users, they are logged in and can view the folder pane, with
the error in the right pane (no message list is accessible); for the new
users, they are immediately presented with the error upon logging in.

 

I have made attempts to determine the cause, most likely a permission issue.
The apache user/group has writable permissions to the data directory (I even
tested with full 777 permissions). I deleted and recreated the data
directory with proper permissions from this page, and tested with data in
the /var folder:

 

http://squirrelmail.org/wiki/DataPermission

 

We have daily backups, and I've pulled backups from several days back, but
no matter what, the prefs error appears and squirrelmail is unusable.

 

I ran the config test, results are below. Any thoughts on how to track down
the problem?

 


SquirrelMail configtest


This script will try to check some aspects of your SquirrelMail
configuration and point you to errors whereever it can find them. You need
to go run conf.pl in the config/ directory first before you run this script.


SquirrelMail version:

1.4.22


Config file version:

1.4.0


Config file last modified:

10 November 2013 11:55:19

Checking PHP configuration...
    PHP version 5.3.23-pl0-gentoo OK.
    Running as apache(81) / apache(82)
    display_errors: 1
    error_reporting: 1
    variables_order OK: GPCS.
    PHP extensions OK. Dynamic loading is disabled.
Checking paths...
    Data dir OK.
    Attachment dir OK.
    Plugins OK.
    Themes OK.
    Default language OK.
    Base URL detected as: https://webmail.neoterichovercraft.com/src
(location base autodetected)
Checking outgoing mail service....
    SMTP server OK (220 mail.neoterichovercraft.com ESMTP)
Checking IMAP service....
    IMAP server ready (* OK [CAPABILITY IMAP4rev1 UIDPLUS CHILDREN NAMESPACE
THREAD=ORDEREDSUBJECT THREAD=REFERENCES SORT QUOTA IDLE STARTTLS]
Courier-IMAP ready. Copyright 1998-2008 Double Precision, Inc. See COPYING
for distribution information.)
    Capabilities: * CAPABILITY IMAP4rev1 UIDPLUS CHILDREN NAMESPACE
THREAD=ORDEREDSUBJECT THREAD=REFERENCES SORT QUOTA IDLE STARTTLS 
Checking internationalization (i18n) settings...
     gettext - Gettext functions are available. On some systems you must
have appropriate system locales compiled.
     mbstring - Mbstring functions are available.
     recode - Recode functions are unavailable.
     iconv - Iconv functions are available.
     timezone - Webmail users can change their time zone settings.
Checking database functions...
    not using database functionality.

Congratulations, your SquirrelMail setup looks fine to me!