[OmniOS-discuss] Postfix service: syslog reports "fatal: the Postfix mail system is already running" every second

[Andries Annema]

Hi all,

Have been running postfix from the "ms.omniti.com" publisher for some 
years now on r151014 without issues.
Last week I updated my October 2016 r151014 system to the latest 
r151014-status, as a first step in the direction of upgrading to the 
latest LTS. I'm not actually there yet to upgrade to r151022; first I 
want to make sure all my services and packages run flawlessly on that 
version. Turns out that being careful pays off.

In this update process, postfix got updated to 
2.11.9-0.151014:20170214T224831Z.
It still works, but /var/log/syslog is filled with a new line ever 
second stating:

".... [ID 947731 mail.crit] fatal: the Postfix mail system is already 
running"

And /var/svc/log/network-smtp-postfix:default.log is repeatedly filled 
with line pairs like:
"[ Jul 14 13:48:50 Executing start method ("/opt/omni/sbin/postfix 
start"). ]
[ Jul 14 13:48:51 Stopping because service exited with an error. ]
[ Jul 14 13:48:51 Executing start method ("/opt/omni/sbin/postfix start"). ]
[ Jul 14 13:48:51 Stopping because service exited with an error. ]
[ Jul 14 13:48:51 Failing too quickly, throttling. ]"

Simply disabling and re-enabling the SMF service does not help.
What did help was this:
$ sudo svcadm disable postfix
$ sudo fuser -k /var/lib/postfix/master.lock
$ sudo rm /var/lib/postfix/master.lock
$ sudo rm /var/spool/postfix/pid/master.pid
$ sudo svcadm enable postfix

That, however, was on r151014.
On a separate, freshly installed r151022 test-system, I installed this 
same postfix 2.11.9 package and the same issue emerged.
However, the fix that worked on r151014, does not seem to work on r151022.
Rebooting doesn't help either.

Funny thing is: it does deliver email nicely, despite this restarting issue.

I tried downgrading to postfix 2.10.10: problem still exists.
Tried downgrading further, to 2.10.2: not possible, because the manifest 
states a "incorporate" dependency on the "entire at 11-0.151014" package. 
Hm, right... now I'm out of ideas.
Any clues?

Regards,
Andries