A Merging We Will Go

Merry Christmas Everybody!

This post will be a bit different today. As a result of some mail merge work I've been doing lately I have compiled a Mail Merge Quick Reference sheet. The writing of this document was spurred by the lack of reference material on the web as well as my frustration with the navigation of the Windows help file.

Unfortunately it is written as a reference to Microsoft Word 2000 as it is all that I have access to here at work. If you are using other versions it's accuracy may vary. This is my first document of this type, so forgive any errors.

So here it is for anyone who is interested.

Say goodbye to "cannot open database /usr/mmdf/table/mmdfdbm"

One of the systems that I regularly care for runs SCO OpenServer Version 5. Since it's commision date it has dutifully sent the root account a mail message every day stating that it "cannot open database /usr/mmdf/table/mmdfdbm." Recently I discovered a way to banish this message for ever. I put it here so that anyone suffering from the same affliction may also benefit.

The cause of this message is really quite simple. If you receive this message, then like my system you probably also use Sendmail rather than MMDF for your mail transport agent. When root's crontab executes the commands 'scosh cronsched -r' and 'scosched -wr' it looks to see if the file /usr/mmdf/table/mmdfdbm exists. Since you are using Sendmail and the file doesn't exist it sends the message to root's mail account.

The easiest way to rid yourself of this message is to comment out the offending lines in root's crontab. To accomplish this run the following command:

# crontab -e -u root

Then comment out (#) the lines containing 'scosh cronsched. Save the changes and exit the editor. You should now see this message disappear forever.