Strange postfix errors after zmcontrol start

[asemenov]

Hi there

At one of zimbra sites we administer and support we have experienced a strange postfix errorneous behaviour on Zimbra restart

All aour sites are configured for daily automatic maintenance (yes, backups too)
and usually it goes with no errors

This is todays maintenance script output head:

Wed Apr 13 02:00:01 MSD 2011 Backup started
Wed Apr 13 02:00:02 MSD 2011 Stopping zimbra...
Host HOSTNAME
        Stopping stats...Done.
        Stopping mta...Done.
        Stopping spell...Done.
        Stopping snmp...Done.
        Stopping cbpolicyd...Done.
        Stopping archiving...Done.
        Stopping antivirus...Done.
        Stopping antispam...Done.
        Stopping imapproxy...Done.
        Stopping memcached...Done.
        Stopping mailbox...Done.
        Stopping logger...Done.
        Stopping zmconfigd...Done.
        Stopping ldap...Done.
Wed Apr 13 02:00:39 MSD 2011 Creating snapshot
  Logical volume "zmsnapshot" created
Wed Apr 13 02:00:42 MSD 2011 Starting zimbra...
Host HOSTNAME
        Starting ldap...Done.
        Starting zmconfigd...Done.
        Starting logger...Done.
        Starting mailbox...Done.
        Starting memcached...Done.
        Starting imapproxy...Done.
        Starting antispam...Done.
        Starting antivirus...Done.
        Starting snmp...Done.
        Starting spell...Done.
        Starting mta...Done.
        Starting stats...Done.
Wed Apr 13 02:01:48 MSD 2011 Mounting and backing up...

everything looks OK.

Usually this is how services log their startup in zimbra.log:

Apr  8 23:25:54 mx clamd[16616]: Database correctly reloaded (941823 signatures)
Apr  8 23:25:59 mx postfix/postfix-script[18444]: starting the Postfix mail system

But postfix actually didn't start correctly (here's zimbra.log):

Apr 13 02:01:51 mx clamd[8282]: Database correctly reloaded (846254 signatures)
Apr 12 22:02:00 mx postfix/postqueue[9078]: fatal: Queue report unavailable - mail system is down

First, I do not understand why timezone didn't apply for postqueue (look at date and time, these 2 lines are sequential in log file)
Second, there was no even a try to start up postfix and the first startup related postfix-script record in log appeared when we manually restarted the whole zimbra (service zimbra restart). Look at the maintenance script log output (the first code block): zimbra's reported that MTA had been successfully started.

We could not find any related to this either in /var/log or in /opt/zimbra/log. Does anyone have any ideas on how to investigate this?

[gvillari]

Hi,

could you post here the output of these commands:

cat /etc/hosts
cat /etc/resolv.conf
dig yourdomain mx
dig yourdomain any
host `hostname` <- note backticks and not single quotes
su - zimbra
postfix check

Regards

[dinho]

I had the same problem, removed the postfix and decided

sudo apt-get remove postfix

Reboot

even removing postfix he keeps the authentication settings.