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

[Jim Klimov]

On July 30, 2017 5:42:31 PM GMT+02:00, Andries Annema <an3s.annema at gmail.com> wrote:
>In the mean time I tried upgrading the separate test-system from
>r151022 
>"vanilla" to the CE-edition -  r151022i by now - hoping this might 
>somehow also solve the below postfix "already running" error. But, it 
>didn't.
>
>Again I tried the solution that worked on r151014 and also a reboot,
>but 
>without success.
>
>This "Postfix mail system is already running"-issue is all over the 
>internet - not specifically on Solarish-systems, that is - but I am 
>clearly missing something here, as I don't seem to get the issue out of
>
>there.
>
>Is there anyone out there with some ideas on this, pretty please?
>
>Thanks.
>
>Andries
>
>
>On 2017-07-14 14:45, Andries Annema wrote:
>> 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
>>
>
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IIRC the root problem was that some pid-file was left in place before restarting, e.g. by ungraceful reboot or timed-out stop with a kill. 
--
Typos courtesy of K-9 Mail on my Android