Ted the Penguin

Postfix Nightmares…

Alright, so I was up until 4 a.m. the other night trying to get Postfix to work on Tiger. I finally got it to work, though it wasn’t easy. I blame OS X’s built in permissions repair, though I’m not 100% sure it wasn’t something that I did inadvertently. Here’s the trials and tribulations of the effort, feel free to skip if you’re not the least bit interested.

So I used Sendmail with I first got my laptop, working with it quite easily using Sendmail Enabler by Cutedge, specifically Bernard Teo. That was back in 2002 when 10.2 was out. With 10.3 (Panther) and 10.4 (Tiger), Apple moved to Postfix for it’s client. I believe they still use Sendmail in 10.4 server, but I’m not sure about that.

Well, Bernard released Postfix Enabler and it worked just as well as Sendmail Enabler did, if not better. It’s been evolving though, and may warrant a name change soon. Long story short, it’s been a while since I’ve used postfix, various reformats, new hard drives, etc, and I felt the need to use it again. (Especailly since my laptop has been becoming more of a mobile machine after I got my new desktop finally up and running.)

So I downloaded it, borrowed a serial number from a friend who uses it (Don’t worry Bernard, I’ll probably buy it in the next week or so, tiz a good product and I support shareware) and fired it up. Started fine, setup of Mail.app was simple and easy to follow with the instructions provied by Postfix Enabler. Strange though, I couldn’t send e-mail. Looked at the logs that Postfix spit out, and it’s complaining about “bad command startup” and “premature end-of-input on public/cleanup socket while reading input attribute name.” A bit of research on google didn’t bring me anything terribly important until I hit upon this page about Postfix on OS X. I ran

sudo postfix check

in the terminal and it popped out all sorts of errors. So I ran the script that the site suggests, but no to no avail.

I ended up taking a closer look at the script and running each process individually, and trying to fix what the logs said postfix was complaining about. I ended up running the following:

sudo chown -R postfix incoming

as it appeared that the problems were within the incoming folder itself. From what I’ve seen of how Postfix works, a new folder is created every time it processes a message with a random name. I think my problem was that there were some folders that already existed and those permissions were throwing off the processing of new ones… but I’m not sure why that would be the case. Ah well.

The script referenced doesn’t apply the permissions mod to the subfolders, the -R flag takes care of that though. I’m not sure what the permissions requirements for the rest of the subfolders would be, so I’m iffy about running

sudo chown -R postfix active bounce corrupt defer deferred flush hold incoming private public maildrop

though it would make sense if it worked.

Now apparently Postfix works, it’s not spitting out errors and it’s playing nice with St. Mary’s exchange server, so… yea. Maybe it’s fixed. I’ll shoot a note to Bernard about this post, maybe a permissions check/fix will be available in the next version of Postfix Enabler…