postfix runs, not receifing or sending mails...

[Aleks]

Hi, I have a problem.
This weekend disk space filled up. We have removed some old backups and other stuff.
Restarted zimbra and all services started fine (except stats, which are not critical)
The only problem is with MTA. Status shows running but the service does not work correctly. I can connect manually to postfix but thats all.
When connected (telnet) I get response "Escape character is '^]'.".
After "helo domain.com" noting happens! It just waits...

I cant find anything useful in logs, no errors, nothing that could gave me a clue.

Only when I try to stop stop&start MTA service I get (or if I run newaliases)

Stopping zmmtaconfig...done.
__fop_file_setup:  Retry limit (100) exceeded
postalias: fatal: open database /etc/aliases.db: File exists
postfix/postfix-script: stopping the Postfix mail system
Stopping saslauthd...done.

The weird most weird part is I have same problem with completely fresh zimbra install! So I'm guessing there is something wrong with system?! But what?
ZCS NE 6.0.6 & fresh 6.0.14 on SLES 10 32bit

[Aleks]

Today Zimbra support fixed the problem, thanks!

The output "postalias: fatal: open database /etc/aliases.db: File exists" is somehow misleading, because it DOES NOT exist.

The procedure of starting MTA generates a temporary db file in /etc (in our case /etc/__db.aliases.db) and then based on this temp file writes /etc/aliases.db (can this be confirmed?) - because the disk was full it only wrote temp. db file.

This temporary file was preventing the creation of /etc/aliases.db.

The solution was to remove temp. file. (there could also be a mechanism to avoid this!)


PS: for anyone else having similar problems (to save a ticket on support) - sharing knowledge makes us stronger