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Ubuntu 20.04 Installation of Spamassassin fails on "chmod: cannot access '/var/lib/spamassassin/compiled'" – Debian

for a while now I am trying to install Spamassassin properly as root user with ‘apt install spamassassin spamc’. The installation fails when it runs sa-compile producing following output:

Setting up sa-compile (3.4.4-1ubuntu1) ...
Running sa-compile (may take a long time)

Warning: Fake start-stop-daemon called, doing nothing.
chmod: cannot access '/var/lib/spamassassin/compiled': No such file or directory
dpkg: error processing package sa-compile (--configure):
 installed sa-compile package post-installation script subprocess returned error exit status

After installation I can run sa-update and sa-compile manually and Spamassassin will start properly, but when installing spamass-milter or amavis the directory ‘compiled’ is removed and the same error occurs again. I tried changing the ownership of the directory to debian-spamd, also recreated the directory manually before running the installation. Even reinstalling Ubuntu 20.04 with the admin panel of my hoster (ip-projects) leads to exactly the same behavior. Building and installing Spamassassin from source works, but I got stuck on setting up the whole thing with spamass-milter (also built from source). This approach is also worse for maintainability.
At first (weeks ago) I tried to install iRedMail as all-in-one mail solution. The installation got stuck at exactly the same point. I think the ‘version’ of Ubuntu 20.04 my hoster provides has some unusual configuration.
I assume it has something todo with privileges but I really have no clue where to start. I would appreciate some help.

UPDATE:
As Yannis suggested I ran the given commands. At first I got the following error:

dpkg: unrecoverable fatal error, aborting:
 unknown system user 'amavis' in statoverride file; the system user got removed

I edited the statoverride file and removed the entries for user ‘amavis’ and removed the folders the amavis user should operate on (don’t know why they were still there since I removed amavis yesterday with apt). Afterwards the command was successful.
dpkg-reconfigure -a gives me unknown option ‘a’. As well as the last command.
Afterwards I restarted the server and tried to reinstall Spamassassin but the error is the same.
When this seems an apt problem I ask myself why other packages like apache2, postfix or dovecot have installed flawlessly?

Regards
Mario

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2

Answers


  1. Chosen as BEST ANSWER
    0

    The problem could be solved! The source of the problem was a damaged start-stop-daemon. Replacing the daemon in sbin/ solved the issue. The broken daemon was a bug in the distributed Ubuntu 20.04 installation at my hosters servers. Since the issue was solved by the support team of my hoster I am not able to go in more details here.

    Regards Mario


  2. 0

    This seems like apt’s problem (not SpamAssasin’s). Please follow the general steps for solving this type of problems and let us know if they helped.

    sudo apt-get autoremove --purge
sudo apt-get autoclean
sudo apt-get -f install
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
sudo dpkg-reconfigure -a
sudo dpkg --configure -a
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