Disorderly Content

2005-05-14

Tiger fun

Looks like I spoke too soon when I raved about how smooth my upgrade to Mac OS X 10.4 was. While diagnosing the instability caused by a flaky memory module I discovered a couple of million errors being reported to the system log. One of these was being generated every second:
    May 14 10:00:02 Timbala postfix/master[7073]: fatal: fifo_listen: remove public/pickup: Permission denied
    May 14 10:00:03 Timbala launchd: org.postfix.master: exited with exit code: 1
When my own attempts to diagnose the problem went nowhere, I tried various Google searches. And eventually I found a blog entry from someone with the same problem. His posting led me to to the launchctl program, which confirmed the presence of the offending process. Telling launchctl to stop it didn't make any difference. So I went searching through launchd's various directories. And in /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/ I found the file I was looking for. I moved the org.postfix.master file out of the way, rebooted and am no longer getting all those spurious errors.

It's obviously a bug that Tiger tried starting Postfix's daemon in the first place. But what's really curious is that my G4 Cube running Tiger doesn't have the same problem. For some reason, it doesn't try to start the Postfix daemon in the first place. Curious.

Update 05/25: Thanks to a blogger who linked to this post, I have undone my brute force solution and replaced it with something that solves the real problem. Apparently, there was a user for the postfix software that didn't get created, as well as a permission problem. After moving the file back where I found it, I ran the following commands:

    sudo /Library/Receipts/Essentials.pkg/Contents/Resources/CreateSystemUsers
    sudo /etc/postfix/post-install set-permissions
    sudo launchctl load -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/org.postfix.master.plist
That seems to have done the trick. Everything looks okay, and the console isn't getting any more spurious messages.

Category: aapl | 2 comments | link