conf_dir needs to be writable

[dylex]

Versions

OS version: Rocky Linux 8.9
Slurm version: 23.11.4
Slurm Mail version: 4.14

Describe the bug

Our slurmctld runs as non-root (SlurmUser=slurm, which is recommended), and we don't want to run slurm-mail as root either, so I changed /var/log/slurm-mail, /var/spool/slurm-mail, and the cron-job to the same owver, but it still complains that the configuration directory is not writable. Why does this need to be writable?

Logs

ERROR:root:Error: /etc/slurm-mail is not writeable
Error: /etc/slurm-mail is not writeable

[neilmunday]

@dylex thanks for raising this issue. You are correct that /etc/slurm-mail does not need to be writeable by Slurm-Mail. The issue is due to the checks that the check_dir function is performing.

I will fix this for version 4.15.

[dylex]

Great, thanks!

[neilmunday]

Slurm-Mail 4.15 has been released. Depending on how you have installed Slurm-Mail you can update like so if you have used the Slurm-Mail repository:

dnf update slurm-mail

[neilmunday]

It should be noted that if you are not running Slurm-Mail as root, the ability for Slurm-Mail to include user's job output in e-mails will not work.