Parallels

Symptoms

Unable to add an alias, getting the error : "File virtusertable is corrupted. Command add on alias failed. Server failed to perform operation due to a run time error."

Resolution

This error can occur if the VDS owner manually edited the /etc/mail/virtusertable file, and left empty lines in the middle of the file.

When adding/removing an alias/user, ServerDirector runs the makemap command (which is part of the sendmail suite) in order to rebuild the virtusertable flat database, if the command returns an error, you will get the error "File virtusertable is corrupted. Command add on alias failed. Server failed to perform operation due to a run time error." in the GUI.

In order to find out exactly what causes makemap to fail, you can run the command while su'ed into the VDS in the following way:

[VDS][/etc/mail]$ makemap hash /etc/mail/virtusertable < /etc/mail/virtusertable

makemap: virtusertable: line 2: syntax error (leading space)

makemap: virtusertable: line 5: syntax error (leading space)

This is an example of the error you will be when the file /etc/mail/virtusertable contains empty lines in line 2 and 5.

In order to fix the issue, simply edit the file /etc/mail/virtusertable, delete the empty lines, and you will be able to add/delete aliases again .

Please make sure to keep the file ownership as vdsuser:vuser.