Cron and logrotate files not created in Ubuntu 20 install?

[abisko00]

Thanks for providing these great mail scripts! They are working just fine, but I made some observations I'd like to share.

I installed slurm-mail from the Ubuntu 20 repo and in the beginning, everything was working as expected, but after a while, I noticed that e-mails got stuck in /var/spool/slurm-mail. As I was expecting that the cron script was in place, I was looking for other causes. Running /usr/bin/slurm-send-mail -v as suggested in the troubleshooting section worked well and without any error messages, but new e-mails got stuck again. Now I noticed that the owner of /var/log/slurm-mail/slurm-send-mail.log was root, while for slurm-spool-mail.log it was slurm. Accordingly, when I do runuser -u slurm -- /usr/bin/slurm-send-mail -v the job fails, saying it can't write to the log file.

Like I said above, it works fine with the cron-job, but maybe it'd be possible to have slurmctld send the e-mails instead if only the log file had the right permission?

And was that fact that the scripts for cron and logrotate did not install a bug or intentional? In the later case, I suggest to emphasize in the readme that they need to be installed manually.

[neilmunday]

Hi,

I've tested Slurm-Mail 4.19 with Ubtuntu 20 and I can see that the /etc/cron.d/slurm-mail and /etc/logrotate.d/slurm-mail files are installed ok.

Are these missing on your set-up?

Be careful running the Slurm-Mail scripts as root as this will cause the log file ownership to change from slurm to root if they did not already exist.

If this happens, then when Slurm tries to run /usr/bin/slurm-spool-mail it will fail.

You could run the following command as root to make sure everything is as it should be:

chown slurm. -R /var/log/slurm-mail /var/spool/slurm-mail

[abisko00]

Thanks for your answer. I guess running the command as root once has caused my current trouble. I will dig a little for the causes of the missing files on my system. Probably the original error was a misconfigured postfix (not listening to all devices), but the analysis has caused the permissions problem. Thx again!